Industry

Teva Pharmaceuticals has agreed to pay $27 million to settle federal and state accusation of false claims regarding the antipsychotic Clozapine, and payments made...

Subsidiaries of Johnson & Johnson have agreed to pay $5.9 million to settle Montana's lawsuit over the company's fraudulent marketing of Risperdal.  According to...

The FDA has released a new checklist meant to clarify the ways a pharmaceutical manufacturer may use scientific and medical literature to promote products....

Lawyers for Johnson & Johnson took the stand in Arkansas today, a final effort at convincing the Arkansas Supreme Court to overturn a jury's...

A study in JAMA Psychiatry finds that inpatient admissions for behavioral health disorders significantly declined following the 2006 expansion of health insurance coverage in...

A Chicago jury awarded $1.5 million to an autistic child who developed irreversible and disabling tardive dyskinesia and tardive akathisia while treated with Risperdal,...

My last blog raised issues about the involvement of Shire Pharmaceuticals in lobbying for the inclusion of mandatory screening of children for ADHD in...

A study from Lisa Cosgrove at Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics of potential conflicts of interest among DSM-5 committee members, investigators of new DSM-5 diagnoses,...

A memorandum submitted on the Children And Families Bill by the UK ADHD Partnership (UKAP) recommended that regulations issued to accompany the Children and Families Bill should include a requirement that “all children who receive two fixed term exclusions from school are screened for ADHD and, if appropriate, an assessment process for ADHD initiated.” The UKAP certainly appears to be a group the UK parliament should trust and, on the face of it, there is no reason that parliament should not adopt their recommendation. Except that the UKAP appears to be a front group for pharmaceutical company Shire, who manufacture the ADHD drug marketed as Vyvanase in the US and Elvanse in the UK.

Delegates attending the International Congress of the Royal College of Psychiatrists at London’s Barbican Centre in June this year will almost certainly not hear about the results of the seven-year outcome of the Dutch First Episode (FE) study widely discussed on Mad in America in recent months.

In 2004, a patient was given an experimental antipsychotic called bifeprunox and died of hepatorenal failure nine days later. But the sponsor apparently did not investigate the death for three years. In late 2007 the sponsor issued a safety alert and suspended all bifeprunox studies. This is where things get interesting.

Harlan Krumholz, director of Yale University's Open Data Access Project (YODA), writes in the New York Times about YODA's agreement to oversee release of Johnson...

Yale University has agreed to screen access - with Johnson & Johnson's input - to detailed clinical trial data on the pharmaceutical giant's products.  ...

Schizophrenia Bulletin follows the movement change to the name and concept of "Schizophrenia", revealing that Japan has taken the lead.  Japan, to remove the...

A Louisiana appeals court has thrown out a $257 million verdict which held Johnson & Johnson liable for deceptive practices in marketing its antipsychotic...

A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that, although "many patients and physicians assume that the safety and effectiveness of...

High Times points out that, with over 20,000 published studies or reviews in the scientific literature that reference cannabis and its active components, science...

Alternet reviews the ways that "Pharma can entice doctors to prescribe its expensive patent drugs, even when they are dangerous." Article →

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that pharmaceutical companies can be held liable for negligent design and marketing of drugs, agreeing with the family...

In 1972, prisoners at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia were paid $3 to have their eyes held open with clamps and hooks while Johnson & Johnson's baby shampoo was dropped into them. In 2011, mothers of newborns were arrested when their babies tested positive for exposure to cannabis, a false result caused by the use of Johnson & Johnson’s Head-to-Toe Foaming Baby Wash. Young men have undergone mastectomies to remove breasts grown as a result of Johnson & Johnson antipsychotics, which were used as a result of Johnson & Johnson's criminal promotion of its drugs for off-label purposes. And now, Johnson & Johnson has announced the removal of carcinogenic chemicals from their No More Tears baby shampoo.

Jim Gottstein's talk on the Role of Litigation in a Strategic Approach to Mental Health System Change at the annual rights conference of the...

Consumer Reports affirms that, though the use of antipsychotic drugs to treat conditions not approved by the Food and Drug Administration has increased significantly in the...

The custody of Justina Pelletier, a Connecticut 15-year-old whose odyssey of diagnosis with "Somatoform Disorder" has trapped her in Boston Children's Hospital since last February, will...

Last week, Rep. Tim Murphy (PA) introduced the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2013 to Congress and almost simultaneously mental health and disability rights advocates voiced their opposition to the proposed legislation with a statement from the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. The bill, as many people who follow what's happening in mental health law know, calls for the enactment of assisted (involuntary) outpatient commitment laws at the Federal level and is purportedly crafted to ensure the safety of those deemed "severely mentally ill" by giving families, courts and mental health providers increased authority to commit individuals to outpatient treatment.

In a first for a major drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, the British pharma that was fined $3 billion for illegal marketing of Paxil and Wellbutrin,...