All the awful things you’ve heard and read about the pharmaceutical companies are documented on the pages of Bad Pharma with compelling clarity and abundant references.
Dr. Goldacre is a British physician. His primary issue is the safety and efficacy of pharmaceutical products in general medicine, but he has a lot to say about psychiatric drugs also.
Here are some quotes:
“Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments.”(p. x)
“First, as we have already seen, companies often bring pressure to bear on academics they are funding, discouraging them from publishing unflattering results and encouraging them to put spin on both the methods and the conclusions of their work.” (p. 111)
“We now know that this entire evidence base has been systematically distorted by the pharmaceutical industry, which has deliberately and selectively withheld the results of trials whose results it didn’t like, while publishing the ones with good results.” (p 349)
A great book.