Joanna is Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at UCL and a consultant psychiatrist working in the community recovery team at the Norther East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT). She is co-chair of the Critical Psychiatry Network. She is the Chief Investigator of the RADAR trial comparing maintenance antipsychotic treatment to gradual antipsychotic reduction or discontinuation in chronic psychotic disorders. She has an interest in the history, philosophy and politics of psychiatry, and particularly in the use, misuse and misrepresentation of psychiatric drugs. Her work has focused on makings sense of how psychiatric drugs ‘work’. A ‘disease-centred’ model, widely used, suggests that psychiatric drugs work by reversing a hypothetical abnormality or ‘chemical imbalance.’ She has formulated an alternative model called the ‘drug-centred’ model which highlights the psychoactive properties of psychoactive drugs: that is they produce characteristic mental alterations that may be superimposed on psychiatric conditions. Her work highlights the confusions and misconceptions that stem from use of the disease-centred model.