Bias, Corruption & Accountability

-Experts comment on AstraZeneca's latest way of attempting to comply with pressures to provide open data.

-Public Citizen analyzed public comments on proposed government rule changes for drug company sales representatives.

-Some online counseling services have half-hidden disclaimers that they aren't actually providing "counseling."

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.

-John Horgan defends a celebrity's right to challenge scientists on vaccines, and points to psychiatry as an example of the dangers of simply deferring to supposed scientific experts.

The more a country's system of medical care expands, the sicker people feel -- and much of that effect seems related to psychiatry.

After a second critical report this month about its psychiatry department's ethical practices and conflicts of interest, the University of Minnesota has temporarily suspended enrollment in its psychiatric drug trials.

-Vox interviews the author of the most read article in the history of PLoS Medicine.

-Neuroskeptic previews an upcoming debate, in which he's involved, on the topic of whether science is "broken."

-Vox interviews the founders of a platform for sharing peer reviews of scientific articles.

Recently the problem of publication bias has been shaking the foundations of much of psychology and medicine. In the field of pharmacology, the problem is worse, because the majority of outcome trials (on which medication approval and physician information is based) are conducted by pharmaceutical firms that stand to benefit enormously from positive results, and run the risk of enormous financial loss from negative ones. Numerous studies have found that positive results tend to be published, while negative ones are quietly tucked under the rug.

The majority of clinical trials are still not reporting their results to the US government's ClinicalTrials.gov.

-Healthy Debate discusses some experiments with doctors paying their patients to engage in healthier behaviors.

-A psychiatric study widely hailed in Swedish media which led to new treatment guidelines was a "fraud," states health reporter and researcher Janne Larsson.

The latest investigative report into the University of Minnesota's psychiatric research practices was "scathing," reported Forbes in a two-part story.

Pharmaceutical companies are regularly breaching industry codes of conduct in their promotion and advertising of their drugs in Europe.

Clinicians are following best practice guidelines only half of the time when giving antipsychotic medications to children, and following FDA-approved indications only one-fourth of the time.

In a commentary published in the University of Ottawa nursing journal Aporia, Paula Caplan writes about how Allen Frances and two other academic psychiatrists...

-Psychologist Joachim Hagopian argues that both psychiatry and psychology as fields have come to be too much about making profits.

-Mother Jones looks at drug company promotional efforts, expanded diagnostic criteria, and the appeal of amphetamines to high-performance cultures globally.

-Highlights of Johnson & Johnson's many "decades of fraud and injury claims" in its pharmaceutical-related activities.

In 2010, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica published a study by Göran Isacsson et al.  The paper was titled Antidepressant medication prevents suicide in depression. It's a complicated article, with some tenuous logic, but, in any event, it's all moot, because the article was retracted by the authors and by Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica about sixteen months after publication.  The retraction had been requested by the authors because of "… unintentional errors in the analysis of the data …"

-The US Government Accountability Office says it is "in the dark" about the effectiveness of federal mental health programs.

University of Liverpool's John Read suggests the "unscientific" nature of psychiatry is a major part of what is driving medical students away from the profession.

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