Industry Funding Biases Antidepressant Efficacy Findings

"Even with preregistration requirements there is a stock of existing drugs potentially based on biased evidence," Oostrom writes.

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A new study confirms that industry funding inflates the apparent efficacy of psychiatric drugs. Tamar Oostrom at Ohio State University looked at all randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of antidepressants and antipsychotics that compared them to placebo or other drugs.

By comparing industry funded trials with independent trials that used the same drug comparison, Oostrom was able to determine the strength of the effect of industry funding.

“The funding interests of a given drug can explain almost half of the relative efficacy of that drug,” Oostrom writes.

The research was published in The Journal of Political Economy.

A bottle of pills tipped over, spilling red and white pills onto a pile of hundred dollar bills

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6 COMMENTS

  1. Psychedelics offer hope because you are, for a moment, released from the ‘default mode network’ of ordinary thinking in the brain. In other words, for a moment it weakens your social conditioning – that’s all. Now, imagine if you were never conditioned in the first place. Imagine if your children were never conditioned in the first place. Then they would always be free of conditioning, and themselves: therefore they would always already be free, themselves, and consequently, as powerful as a human being can be. So why do we instead condition them and make them take antidepressants? It’s the immeasurable insanity of a society that will not let us be free. To condition a child is to destroy a child, which is to say turning them into what we are. That is an immeasurably violent thing to do.

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  2. Every article written on Mad in America is still just an architecture of our ignorance. It is critical, has some critical power, but it is like a sharpened pencil: perfunctory communication, not the miracle of human creative, natural freedom that gives true clarity and insight and seriousness, the nature of which cannot be confined to a particular social commitment like a critique of psychiatry and psychopharmacology. That natural freedom involves seeing what is and being what you are, which is the sole casualty of our social conditioning which therefore becomes the sole destroyer of who we really are, which is Nature in her freedom, until that freedom is destroyed by this social conditioning. With that freedom comes health, clarity and sanity. When you see psychiatry through this native clarity, you see that it is just a demonstrable and clear example of a much more vast and crushing disease that society and the intellect, being one indivisible process, too are. And then you would use this website as a means to expose the vaster problem, and a critique of psychiatry is a good means. But so too is a critique of medicine and the prison system. So too is a critique of consumption and greed. So are many other things. And none of these things gain their full significance outside of the much vaster disease. You should be allied on this website with the environmentalist movements and the critiques of capitalism, because you are all in some way or another critiquing the same process destroying us all, and destroying everything that might make life worth living in the future. Civilization is one total process and you can’t divide them into separate problems, ranked more or less important, because this destroys any possibility of working with or grasping the whole process, which is the whole problem that contains all the smaller problems. Nothing in human life has meaning besides this problem because it is threatening and destroying all, not least all of our children with their now apparently worthless futures which at best could only hope to amount to the continuation of our enormously destructive and bankrupt lives. This is what our survival would look like, if you are still so socially conditioned and enormously gullible to believe humanity can survive. Humanity cannot and will not survive. A new human can, but you have to become one, and that new human is the old human, the natural human but this time in a freedom that we never previously have had. Why? Because the disease of intellect/civilization is the whole evolutionary thrust of the brain. Once the left and right brains have finished evolving, the intellect/civilization has no further value, and the left and right brains begin to integrate through perception, free of all authority, which is that process they called enlightenment but we have a long transformation to undergo, and we won’t be calling this process enlightenment. It takes us beyond what has been known, even by the mystics. This is the very truth people. Civilization and intellect is our learning, our accumulated mistakes, our karma manifest. Once we have learned through observation and understanding we can put them away forever, as the fruit of our engagement with them has been hardwired into our hearts, consciousness and brains. This is the truth people. See the fact. This is why the whole world and intellect is coming crashing down. The energy has left and is concentrated now for destruction and illumination.

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    • Brilliant observations, No-one. I appreciate the intricacy and clarity with which you present your arguments.

      I wholeheartedly agree that intellectual pussy footing around the edges of an inarguably distorted take on reality does little to alleviate the source of the conundrum.

      In other words, why not call it out for what it is: BRIBERY

      But either way, here’s how I see things: society’s problems are best chalked up to a collective case of full-blown narcissism topped off with a large dollop of self-inflicted spellbinding, courtesy BIG PHARMA —

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      • I don’t know if you’re predictions will come true, but who cares – you are such a prediction and you have come true. You are true. You’re honest. An honest human being is the truth but they don’t know it. I know you are the truth Birdsong, which is why I love to listen to your Birdsong. And I will have you know I did feed many honey coated cashew nuts to the pigeons. I know I will go to a big fat pigeon hell where I have to eat lots of honey coated cashew nuts but I don’t care, I’m a pigeon who ate too many nuts and now I’m nuts like a pigeon. Have a lovely day Birdsong. You make every day my day.

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