Bias, Corruption & Accountability

Medically-induced harm—affecting tens of millions of people worldwide—has taken the field decades to take seriously.

From The Guardian: The field of psychology is fraught with fundamental problems in its research practices, from publication bias to data corruption. The field must...

In a new study, researchers examined 29 popular introduction to psychology textbooks and found that almost 80% included misinformation about intelligence.

Professional psychologists designed most of the main techniques and strategies and played ongoing, active, central roles in the CIA's torture of people it was...

-Despite an "epidemic" of "expanding disease definitions that medicalize more people," most Australians have no idea that overdiagnosis is a problem.

A study in PLoS One shows that the number of National Heart Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) funded drug trials reporting positive results declined precipitously after the implementation of the clinicaltrials.gov registry, which requires researchers to record their trial methods and outcome measures before collecting data. Of the 55 studies examined, 57% percent of those published before the implementation of clinicaltrials.gov in 2000 yielded a positive result. After 2000, only eight percent of trials claimed a significant benefit to the intervention examined.

Pharmaceutical industry executives who mislead the public could soon face fines of up to $5 million or two years in jail in Canada. According...

A new study suggests that epigenetic changes that have been associated with trauma may actually be due to environmental toxins.

In a new report, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Dr. Dainius Pūras, calls for a move away from the biomedical model and “excessive use of psychotropic medicines.”

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has issued a watchdog report titled “Illness Inflation” that examines how new medical conditions are often the product of industry...

A discourse analysis conducted by sociologists finds problematic assumptions and practices in the field of neurocriminology.

Despite concerns about the drug’s necessity, effectiveness, and side-effects, Flibanserin (Addyi) has come to market as the first drug designed to increase sexual desire in women

In the New York Times, two co-founders of Retraction Watch ponder examples of scientists caught committing research fraud to gain grants and further their...

More than forty thousand papers have been published using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to explore the brain. A new analysis of the common...

-Jeffrey A. Lieberman discusses the "indignity" that psychiatry suffered as a result of a recent article by Tanya Luhrmann.

Recent meta-analyses of antidepressant clinical trials have revealed that up to 82% of the effects associated with the drugs may be attributed to placebo and non-medication factors. A new study examined the attitudes of psychiatrists toward these non-pharmacologic factors and found a large discrepancy between their beliefs and the empirical evidence.

A recent Cochrane review has found that serious adverse events occur for about 1% of children and adolescents treated with Ritalin.

In a review editorial for the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, neurobiology researcher Steven Dubovsky from the University at Buffalo argues against the adoption of...

“Converging lines of evidence now suggest that depression—a common comorbidity in the setting of chronic pain—may in some patients represent an unrecognized yet potentially reversible harm of opioid therapy.”

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Last week, 200 doctors and scientists assembled at Georgetown University for the 10th annual conference of PharmedOut, an educational...

Human behavioral genetics and its allied field of psychiatric genetics are in trouble, as unfulfilled gene discovery expectations during the “euphoria of the 1980s” have continued to the present day, leading to researchers’ “nonreplication curse” dysphoria of the 2010s. In my recent book The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, I presented a detailed argument that genetic interpretations of the common “classical twin method” finding that reared-together MZ twin pairs resemble each other more (correlate higher) for behavioral characteristics than do reared-together same-sex DZ twin pairs are invalid because, among other reasons, the twin method’s crucial MZ-DZ “equal environment assumption” (EEA) is false.

Well known Stanford University researcher John Ioannidis published a new paper this week criticizing the use and production of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, often...

From STAT: The U.S. Supreme Court case of Bristol-Meyers Squibb Co. vs. Superior Court of California, in which hundreds of plaintiffs claimed the drug Plavix...

Today’s NY Times front page featured a story on the problem reproducibility poses for many psychology studies. The story is based on the results of a year-long study where the researchers found they were unable to reproduce 60 out of 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals. “The overall ‘effect size,’ a measure of the strength of a finding, dropped by about half across all of the studies.”

In this piece for CounterPunch, Bruce Levine critiques the pervasive hypocrisy among U.S. mental health professionals, who on one hand claim they hope to abolish the...