Antipsychotics

The recent research scandals out of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychiatry may be alarming, but they are not new. Back in the 1990s, when the university was working its way towards a crippling probation by the National Institutes of Health (for yet another episode of misconduct (this time in the Department of Surgery), the Department of Psychiatry hosted two spectacular cases of research wrongdoing, both of which resulted in faculty members being disqualified from conducting research by the FDA.

This week, MIA highlighted a recently published study of the four most commonly prescribed neurolpetics. As noted in the post, the major outcome was that these drugs were not found to be effective or safe. This important study, co-authored by Dilip Jeste the current president of the American Psychiatric Association, is worth reviewing in greater detail.

A 5-year study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and conducted by U.C. San Diego School of Medicine, Stanford University and the...

The suicide of Dan Markingson at the University of Minnesota has brought notoriety to the CAFÉ study and its site investigators, Stephen Olson and Charles Schulz. But the “corrective action” recently issued by the Minnesota Board of Social Work against the CAFÉ study coordinator, Jean Kenney, has raised another disturbing question.

The suicide of Dan Markingson at the University of Minnesota has brought notoriety to the CAFÉ study and its site investigators, Stephen Olson and Charles Schulz. But the “corrective action” recently issued by the Minnesota Board of Social Work against the CAFÉ study coordinator, Jean Kenney, has raised another disturbing question.

In the "agreement for corrective action" against CAFE study coordinator Jean Kenney last week, the Board of Social Work cited Kenney's failure to respond to "alarming voicemail messages" from family members of Dan Markingson. Presumably, the Board is referring to a message left by his mother, Mary Weiss, which warned, "Do we have to wait until he kills himself or someone else before anyone else does anything?" The failure of Kenney and Stephen Olson to take the warnings of Mary Weiss seriously has been one of the most disturbing aspects of this case. In a deposition for the lawsuit filed by Weiss, Kenney was questioned about her response. Here is an excerpt. (The initial questions come from Gale Pearson, an attorney for Mary Weiss.)

Out here in Minnesota, where the snow is gently falling, many of us are hunched over our computers, puzzling over a document just posted by the state Board of Social Work. It concerns the death of Dan Markingson (or as the document calls him, “Client #1”). Markingson, of course, was a young man under a commitment order who was coerced into a profitable Seroquel marketing study at the University of Minnesota over the objections of his mother, and whose condition spiraled downward until he committed suicide.

Despite 2004 clinical guidelines issued by the Veterans' Administration that "there is insufficient evidence to recommend atypical antipsychotics for the treatment of PTSD,"  ...

Researchers in Singapore find that antipsychotic medications are associated with changes to colonic architecture, which could result in difficult colonoscopy and increased colonoscopy-related risks....

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The state of Ohio plans to invest $1 million in the next three years to review the use of psychiatric drugs prescribed to children,...

Following a fourfold-increase in antidepressant use in Scotland over the last two decades, one in seven Scots are taking the drugs.  Prescriptions for antipsychotics...

Professor of psychiatry Richard Friedman traces the history of antipsychotics in the New York Times Health section yesterday, finding that the promise of atypical...

In a victory for Johnson & Johnson, a Philadelphia judge ruled that CEO Alex Gorsky cannot be called as a witness by the plaintiff,...

In a study of the Swedish Medical Birth Registry published in the British Medical Journal, researchers identified all 324,510 single children born between 1988...