Conflict of Interest

Courtesy of Carl Elliott via Twitter, I’ve recently read Dr. Lieberman’s latest post on Psychiatric News. It’s called – believe it or not – Time to Re-Engage With Pharma? dated August 1, 2013. And it’s classic Dr. Lieberman sleight of hand. His opening statement, for instance, reads: "Drug companies aren’t held in high esteem by the public these days." This may or may not be true. But note what he's done. The issue here is the long-standing and corrupt relationship between psychiatry and the manufacturers of drugs. But from his first sentence, Dr. Lieberman has taken psychiatry out of the equation. He has also lumped the makers of legitimate medicines in with the makers of psychiatry’s drugs. ...

There’s an editorial by Henry Nasrallah, MD, in last month’s edition of Current Psychiatry. Dr. Nasrallah is the journal’s editor-in-chief. The title of the article is Haloperidol clearly is neurotoxic. Should it be banned? Haloperidol is marketed under the brand name Haldol, but its patent has long expired, and a generic version is available and inexpensive. Here’s a quote from Dr. Nasrallah’s article: "If clinicians who use these decades old drugs were to keep up with medical research and advances in knowledge, we would realize what a travesty it is to use a brain-unfriendly drug such as haloperidol when we have many safer alternatives. A massive volume of knowledge has emerged over the past 15 years about the neurotoxicity of older neuroleptics, especially haloperidol—knowledge that was completely unknown before. Second-generation antipsychotics have been shown to be much safer for the brain than their older-generation counterparts (although they are not more efficacious)." ...

BACKGROUND The CAFE Study, conducted by Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, et al between 2002 and 2005, has been the subject of much comment. Carl Elliott, in particular, has written extensively on the matter, including his article The Deadly Corruption of Clinical Trials in Mother Jones. In order to address the issues involved in the CAFE study, we must first take a brief look at the CATIE study. This was also conducted by Dr. Lieberman et al (not the same et al as CAFE, but with some overlap). CATIE was conducted between 2001 and 2004. ...

On Twitter yesterday, Robert Stamatakis commented: "I have to ask, I don't understand. Do you work in the UK? Your descriptions of psychiatry are nothing I recognize. These descriptions of psychiatry are nothing like the practice I see on a daily basis." I am certainly a very outspoken critic of psychiatry, and in that regard Robert's question/challenge is a fair one, to which I will try to respond. My primary criticism of modern psychiatry – and indeed the criticism that underpins all the others – is that its fundamental concepts are spurious. ...

On March 12 of this year, the Los Angeles Daily News ran an article by Susan Abram titled: Doctors report big pharma payouts for drug endorsements. It discusses the financial ties between physicians and drug companies in California. Here are some quotes: "In fact, hundreds of physicians, psychiatrists, and medical school faculty members across California are on the payroll of major drug companies, earning tens of thousands of dollars for speaking to other medical professionals at events held by industry leaders that make drugs such as Advair, Cymbalta, Viagra and Zoloft." ...

There’s an interesting article on MINNPOST, Many mental-illness websites show drug-company bias, study finds, dated May 16. The article is by Susan Perry, and presents the results of a Web survey of mental health websites conducted by John Read and A. Cain from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The original study was published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. You can see the abstract here. The full article is behind a paywall. (Thanks to Leonie Fennell for the link.) ...

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, is president-elect of the APA, and is scheduled to take over the reins from Dr. Dilip Jeste this month. Never in its history has the APA been subject to such scrutiny or criticism from such diverse sources, and one might reasonably have expected Dr. Lieberman to open on a conciliatory note, promising investigations, reforms, etc…. But no! He’s in the ring slugging furiously from the opening bell. Two days ago (May 20) he published an article in Scientific American titled DSM-5: Caught between Mental Illness Stigma and Anti-Psychiatry Prejudice. ...

There’s a new post on Mick Bramham’s website called “A time to grieve, a time to console, and a time to profit?” You can see it here. You might have thought that, given the adverse publicity that pharma has been receiving in recent years, they would be easing up on their expansionist agenda. But you would be wrong. The APA has declared open season on bereavement, and although DSM-5 won’t be released for a few more weeks, Eli Lilly is already grooming their SNRI Cymbalta as a “treatment” for this pseudo illness. ...

BACKGROUND The primary purpose of the bio-psychiatric-pharma faction is to expand turf and sell more drugs. This is a multi-faceted endeavor, one component of which is disease mongering. This consists of using marketing techniques to persuade large numbers of people that they have an illness which needs to be treated with drugs. With regards to postpartum depression, it is an obvious fact that some mothers do indeed experience a measure of depression in the period after giving birth. The term postpartum depression has in the past been generally understood to mean that the problem had something to do with hormones. Today brain chemicals are blamed. ...

It is easy to vilify psychiatrists. Their spurious conceptual framework, toxic “treatments’ and blatantly corrupt links to pharma make them easy targets. Their destructive activities, to which they resolutely cling, invite criticism which they steadfastly ignore. Any thoughts that perhaps they had seen the errors of their ways have been dashed by the soon-to-be published DSM-5, which promises to be business as usual, only more so. HOW DID THEY GET THIS WAY? ...