Bias, Corruption & Accountability

The Nordic Cochrane Center conducted a systematic review of existing research trials on antidepressants and found that the drugs doubled the risk of feelings...

A new article, just published online in the journal Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, presents research suggesting that the diagnosis of ADHD is philosophically inadequate.

Behind the U.S. task force recommendation to screen all children and adults for depression.

In this piece for Aeon, Siddhartha Roy and Marc A. Edwards explore how increasingly perverse incentives and the academic business model are affecting scientific practices and...

-An NEJM "Reader Poll" shows nearly 80% of respondents trusting that scientific reviews can be responsibly written by people taking money from pharmaceutical companies, but not who work with patient-advocacy groups.

Last year, over twenty major institutions worldwide jointly committed to posting the results of all their clinical trials within a 12 month time frame. NIMH’s frequent failure to do so is especially concerning because evidence distortion appears to be remarkably widespread in journal articles discussing trials of psychiatric drugs.

-A fired government health economist says that his research was showing that 60,000 Americans now taking antipsychotic medications will die prematurely.

Scholars from the Centre for Global Health Policy describe changes in drug policies being taken by many national governments that are motivated by national security concerns.

Six men were hospitalized and one was pronounced brain dead after participating in a phase 1 clinical drug for a mood, anxiety, and motor dysfunction drug manufactured by Bial and administered by Biotrial. Carl Elliott, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, said investigators should look into questions like how much the men were paid and whether they properly consented to the trial. “Many Phase 1 trial volunteers are poor and unemployed, and they volunteer for trials like this because they are desperate for money,” he said. “This means they are easily exploited.”

In a new study, researchers argue that correlational studies may not sufficiently account for alternative explanations, and offer suggestions for mitigating this danger.

From NPR: A recent report by the Washington Health Alliance has helped to quantify the epidemic of medical overtreatment and healthcare waste. "What the group found...

In an op-ed for the Guardian, cardiologist Aseem Malhotra writes: “Corporate greed and systematic political failure have brought healthcare to its knees. There are too many misinformed doctors and misinformed patients. It’s time for greater transparency and stronger accountability, so that doctors and nurses can provide the best quality care for the most important person in the consultation room – the patient.”

The researchers suggest that their finding implies a common genetic cause behind five different “disorders.” This is big news! If true, it validates the biomedical view of mental “illness” and suggests that future medical treatments could “cure” these conditions. However, that grand conclusion is not supported by the data.

From The Guardian: At age 17, Nicole Kluemper came to be one of the most controversial cases in modern psychology when she recovered memories of...

Despite safety concerns, a new study reveals that there has been no change in the use of benzodiazepines in the elderly from 2001 to 2010.

-Adding irrelevant information about neuroscience made psychological theories seem much more convincing to psychology students.

In December, MIA  reported on a systematic Cochrane review on the research for the safety and effectiveness of Ritalin (methylphenidate) that found substantial bias...

Critical psychiatry researcher, anthropologist and NYU professor Helena Hansen writes: “Opioid maintenance acts as a kind of pharmaceutical prosthesis which promises to return white ‘addicts’ to regaining their status as full human persons and middle-class consumers. Meanwhile, black and brown users are not deemed as persons to be rescued, but rather dangerous subjects to be pharmaceutically contained within the public discipline of the state.”

In the past six years, I have had the opportunity to speak at several conferences or meetings that I felt had particular potential to stir some political activity that would challenge current psychiatric practices, and one of those events was the meeting convened in the U.K.’s Parliament on May 11th, which had this title for the day: Rising Prescriptions, Rising Mental Health Disability: Is There a Link?

Yesterday, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) released an editorial entitled “Confluence, Not Conflict of Interest: Name Change Necessary.” The authors argue that the phrase “conflict of interest is pejorative,” and a better term “would be confluence of interest, implying an alingnment of primary and secondary interests.”

-HealthNewsReview.org takes on Dr. Richard Friedman's description of a “potential biomarker in the brain that would help psychiatrists direct depressed patients towards treatment to which they would more likely respond.”

If academic psychiatry is evidence-based, why did it take two decades to recognize SSRI withdrawal as widespread and chronic among patients?

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...

-The Conversation has run a seven-article series discussing the history, politics and philosophical underpinnings of ethically questionable medical research.

A new analysis of the information that the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) publishes for parents about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) concludes that the children’s experiences and contexts are ignored and that medication is presented, misleadingly, as the only solution supported by research evidence.