Tag: Institutional Corruption

The National Council for Behavioral Health has released a new pamphlet titled “Guide to Long-Acting Medications for Providers and Organizations.” By downplaying some aspects of the available science, the pamphlet implicitly acts as a promotional tool for the pharmaceutical industry.

My story is not just about the personal costs of speaking truth to power. This is a story about institutional corruption and one of the worst show trials in academia that you can imagine. I have written a book that documents the truth, backed by leaked board room recordings, private emails and testimony from concerned citizens.

A corrupt world is built brick by brick by individual acts of shame and silence. Can we break the silence that protects misconduct even while it means being exposed ourselves? Psychiatry and the mental health system are failing, but they are also just sets of human relationships, relationships we are also part of.

In the May 2018 issue of Current Psychiatry, renowned psychiatrist and editor in chief Dr. Henry Nasrallah provides a list of 27 "principles of psychiatric practice," most of them self-serving platitudes. There's one principle he has omitted, if we are to consider his own career to be exemplary: Cultivate mutually beneficial relationships with pharmaceutical companies.

The US/Canadian Pharmaceutical Policy Reform Working Group proposes universal drug coverage and ambitious reforms to the pharmaceutical system.

I’ve been around the block a few times, so I was not shocked by the revelations in Art Levine’s absorbing and well-researched new book, Mental Health, Inc.: How Corruption, Lax Oversight and Failed Reforms Endanger Our Most Vulnerable Citizens. But I was certainly appalled.

Biological psychiatry has managed to stealthily become America’s first state-sponsored religion, by disguising itself as a helpful, scientific medical field. Millions have been led astray by its lies, and enslaved by its labels and drugs. It will take ten plagues to free them. Psychiatry’s tenth plague has only just begun.

New study finds that pharmaceutical industry gifts to medical providers in Washington D.C. are associated with higher cost, higher volume prescribing behavior.

The leadership of our mental health advocacy groups agree that money has corrupted democracy in the US and this has resulted in blocking potential for real reform. But they aren’t willing to act on connecting their small single-issue efforts with the larger movement against corruption. Why?

A medical journal is expected to promote an open-minded discussion of treatments, even if findings—or criticisms—threaten conventional beliefs. But the American Journal of Psychiatry will not find space for criticism even if it comes from one of the best-known psychiatrists in the world.

The researchers conclude that industry funding appears to bias studies towards pharmacotherapy over psychotherapy for the treatment of depression.

Ed Silverman reports for STAT that a provision tucked into the 21st Century Cares legislation exempts companies from reporting payments made to doctors, journals,...

Kaiser Health News and NPR report on the immense lobbying effort aimed at passing the "21st Century Cures" Act which would fast-track FDA approval...

Pharmaguy investigates the rise of adverse event reports filed each year and reports on a new article in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics ("Institutional...

The Watchdogs cover a new paper, titled “The Natural Selection of Bad Science.” The researchers write that “some of the most powerful incentives in...

While there has been a recent push to account for financial conflicts of interest in medical research, less attention has been paid to organizations...

The assertion that the so-called antidepressants are being over-prescribed implies that there is a correct and appropriate level of prescribing and that depression is a chronic illness (just like diabetes). It has been an integral part of psychiatry's message that although depression might have been triggered by an external event, it is essentially an illness residing within the person's neurochemistry. The issue is not whether people should or shouldn't take pills. The issue is psychiatry pushing these dangerous serotonin-disruptive chemicals on people, under the pretense that they have an illness.

Psychiatry would long since have gone the way of phrenology and mesmerism but for the financial support it receives from the pharmaceutical industry. But the truth has a way of trickling out. Here are five recent stories that buck the psychiatry-friendly stance that has characterized the mainstream media for at least the past 50 years.

A new analysis by ProPublica finds that the more money doctors receive from drug manufacturers, the more brand name drugs they prescribe. “Indeed, doctors...

“The drug industry spent $272,000 in campaign donations per member of Congress last year,” Martha Rosenberg writes for Alternet. As a result, Pharma is taking...

“Those who possess the data control the story.” In the wake of the reanalysis of the infamous Study 329, where scientific data claiming the antidepressant Paxil was safe and effective for teens was egregiously manipulated, researchers are pushing for open access to raw data. “The issue here, scientists argue, is that without independent confirmation, it becomes too easy to manipulate data.”

Sociologist Garry Gray examines the institutional pressures and systemic failings that allow unsafe drugs to hit the market. “Research integrity and the institutional structures that support scientific research are key to understanding and eliminating scientific compromises. Without this understanding, we can’t truly progress beyond the 'Grünenthal science' that underscored the thalidomide tragedy.”

“While evidence of abuse of the disabled has piled up for decades, one for-profit company has used its deep pockets and influence to bully weak regulators and evade accountability.”

Martha Rosenberg highlights how the popular antipsychotic Seroquel is a perfect example of how direct-to-consumer advertising made billion dollar blockbuster drugs possible before side-effects...

“About 30 percent of senators and 20 percent of representatives held assets in biomedical and health-care companies, or in specialty funds set up to invest...