A March 17, 2025, article in the New York Times (updated March 24) by Ellen Barry worried me and should be read by all with an interest in mental health care.

The article on Laura Delano’s national movement—that lay coaches supervise the taper and discontinuation of psychoactive medications in vast numbers of patients—encourages an overly optimistic view of what non-clinician Delano has to offer by allotting more space to its attributes than to the far greater dangers.

Barry accurately underscores the harmful, widespread use of psychoactive drugs, as people may be taking as many as three or four medications. Indeed, she says that 25 percent of Americans took these medications during the coronavirus pandemic. Delano’s experience is encouraging in that she felt better after stopping the medications she’d taken for many years—and she reports similar benefits for others in her lay business where she coaches them to taper and discontinue psychoactive agents.

I’m surprised, though, that no one has spotted Delano’s major error: blaming psychiatry for psychoactive medication overuse. It’s well known that primary care and other medical clinicians prescribe more than 60 percent of all psychoactive drugs.1 Beyond the numeric disparity, however, there’s a further problem that leads to overuse. Medicine does not train medical doctors in mental health or the use of psychoactive drugs.2,3 Yet, often at the urging of drug detail representatives, they prescribe most of them. Medicine also does not train primary care doctors in often complicated tapering procedures, nor do they teach them to follow up closely during drug discontinuation. Worse yet, doctors do not know how to manage problems of drug withdrawal, drug dependence, or........

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