Research Corruption

On July 25, 2017, Fredrik Hieronymus et al published a meta-analysis in Molecular Psychiatry. The study is titled Efficacy of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in the absence of side effects: a mega-analysis of citalopram and paroxetine in adult depression. Elias Eriksson, PhD, Head of the Department of Pharmacology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, is the principal author, but as Fredrik Hieronymus is the first author listed, I will refer to the article as Hieronymus et al. ...

In their Fall 2013 issue, the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics published a symposium of papers by members of the Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. The symposium was called Institutional Corruption and Pharmaceutical Policy. The symposium focuses on pharmaceutical products generally, but all the material is relevant and important in the context of psychiatric drugs. In this post I will highlight one of these papers: Institutional Corruption of Pharmaceuticals and the Myth of Safe and Effective Drugs, by Donald W. Light, Joel Lexchin, and Jonathan J. Darrow. ...

On April 11, 2014, journalist Alan Schwarz (brief bio here) published an article in the New York Times on this topic, titled Idea of New attention Disorder Spurs Research, and Debate. Alan has written extensively on the rising rates of the condition known as ADHD, and on the abuse of the drugs that are used to “treat” this condition. He has drawn a good deal of criticism from psychiatry’s believers. ...

In January of this year, Steven Hyman MD, former Director of NIMH and currently a leading psychiatric researcher at MIT and Harvard, published Revitalizing Psychiatric Therapeutics in Neuropsychopharmacology. The article is in the journal’s commentary section and is essentially an opinion piece. Here’s Dr. Hyman’s summary: "Despite high prevalence and enormous unmet medical need, the pharmaceutical industry has recently de-emphasized neuropsychiatric disorders as 'too difficult' a challenge to warrant major investment. Here I describe major obstacles to drug discovery and development including a lack of new molecular targets, shortcomings of current animal models, and the lack of biomarkers for clinical trials. My major focus, however, is on new technologies and scientific approaches to neuropsychiatric disorders that give promise for revitalizing therapeutics and may thus answer industry's concerns." ...

BACKGROUND On December 8, I received the following question from a reader: (The subject matter is the controversial CAFÉ – Comparisons of Atypicals in First Episode of Psychosis - study. This was the study in which Dan Markingson committed suicide.) "It appears that there was no head-to-head with a control group taking a placebo pill. Nor was there a control group featuring 'old' types of 'antipsychotic'. If that was the case then it is very poor study. If you are just looking at 3 'new' subtypes of a 'new' class - then what on earth can you hope to show from the data." ...

In 2004, 26-year-old Dan Markingson committed suicide. Since then, numerous concerns have been expressed about the events that led up to his death. In particular, it has been claimed that he was coerced into the CAFE study, and that he was too delusional to understand what was involved. It has also been reported widely that his mother, Mary Weiss, saw his condition deteriorate while he was taking the study drug - Seroquel (quetiapine) - and that she made numerous unsuccessful requests to the researchers to have him removed from the study. ...

In December 2012, Mark Olfson, MD, et al, published an article in the Archives of General Psychiatry. The title is National Trends in the Office-Based Treatment of Children, Adolescents, and Adults with Antipsychotics. The authors collected data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys for the period 1993-2009, and looked for trends in antipsychotic prescribing for children, adolescents, and adults in outpatient visits. Here are the results: Age Increase in no. of antipsychotic prescriptions per 100 population (1993-2009) 0-13 0.24-1.83 (almost 8-fold) 14-20 0.78-3.76 (almost 5-fold) 21+ 3.25-6.18 (almost 2-fold)   The authors provide a breakdown of the diagnoses assigned to the children and adolescents during the antipsychotic visits. ...

If you haven’t seen Jon Rappoport’s blog, please take a look. Here are two quotes from his September 22 post, Psychiatry targets college students for destruction: "The concept called 'mental disorder' is a sales pitch backed up by extraordinary PR, money, academic gibberish, and government-granted official status." "People need to wake up to the fact that the whole panoply of human suffering has been co-opted, taken over, redefined, re-translated into a lexicon of pseudoscience." ...

There was an interesting article Big pharma mobilising patients in battle over drugs trials data in last Sunday’s Guardian, a UK newspaper. It was written by Ian Sample, the Guardian’s science correspondent. Here are the two opening sentences: "The pharmaceutical industry has 'mobilised' an army of patient groups to lobby against plans to force companies to publish secret documents on drugs trials." "Drugs companies publish only a fraction of their results and keep much of the information to themselves, but regulators want to ban the practice. If companies published all of their clinical trials data, independent scientists could reanalyse their results and check companies' claims about the safety and efficacy of drugs." ...

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. ...