Bias, Corruption & Accountability

In addition to hosting the Panorama programs and The Famous Grouse history of Study 329, Study329.org has a comprehensive timeline on the origins of concerns about the SSRIs and the risk of suicide, initially with Prozac and subsequently with Paxil/Seroxat. The hope is to provide a comprehensive repository for anyone who wants to study SSRIs, RCTs, and Study 329 in particular.

Drug companies must start publicly releasing information about different types of payments to Australia's physicians.

Citing the work of Lisa Cosgrove and Robert Whitaker in Psychiatry Under the Influence, Giovanni A. Fava, MD, provides an analysis of some subtle...

From The New York Times: Tech companies are increasingly recruiting school teachers to help improve and promote their education tools in exchange for perks, including...

From STAT: On March 20th, President Trump blamed this country's "outrageous" drug prices on campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry. The next day, pharmaceutical companies...

Dr. Mickey Nardo adds to the ongoing discussion about the RAISE study results. He writes: “If there is ‘spin’ in the reporting of this study, we need to know about it. I personally think that it’s more important for RAISE to be reported completely and honestly than whether it comes out like they [or I] want it to come out. We don’t need some sanitized version of RAISE to tell us we need to turn our attention to a full bodied approach to the treatment of First Episode psychotic patients. We all already know that. What we do need is to have our confidence restored in our research community – that they will honestly and clearly report their findings whether they are clean as a whistle or an unholy mess.”

Writing for the Huffington Post, Caroline Beaton looks into how drugs continue to make billions in sales even after they lose lawsuits for fraud and misconduct. “The persistence of Big Pharma's fraud despite ubiquitous legal action suggests that our present efforts to hold the industry accountable are ineffective,” Beaton writes. “New polices in motion will make potentially unsafe drugs even easier to bring to market and promote.”

Research highlights the need for conflict of interest transparency and management in systemic reviews of psychological therapies.

-People who've been arrested for sexual offences can end up indefinitely incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, depending on their answers to a ten-question form.

The authors of a large scale well-conducted systematic review of methylphenidate, also known as Ritalin, conclude that there is a lack of quality evidence for the drug’s effectiveness. Their research also revealed that Ritalin can cause sleep problems and decreased appetite in children.

Scientific freedom and integrity are constantly under attack, particularly in healthcare, which is dominated by the drug industry and other economic interests. To help preserve honesty and integrity in science, the new Institute for Scientific Freedom will open on March 9 with an international meeting in Copenhagen.

Researchers from the City College of New York and Columbia University published a study this month testing the hypothesis that people diagnosed with schizophrenia treated long-term with antipsychotic drugs have worse outcomes than patients with no exposure to these drugs. They concluded that there is not a sufficient evidence base for the standard practice of long-term use of antipsychotic medications.

A discussion of the role of epistemic injustice in the experiences of patients diagnosed with psychiatric disorders.

The New York Times’ Anahad O’Connor investigates how the sugar industry paid scientists as far back as the 1960s to downplay the link between...

Ed Silverman reports for STAT that a provision tucked into the 21st Century Cares legislation exempts companies from reporting payments made to doctors, journals,...

A new study, published this month in the Journal of Affective Disorders, investigated the effectiveness of weekly intravenous ketamine injections as a treatment for...

A new study, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, found no link between genetics and the occurrence of depressive symptoms.

A group of physicians and academics in Australia has launched a campaign to ban all pharmaceutical company sales representatives from visiting any medical doctors...

Students from Harvard Medical School joined students from Tufts University to protest Joseph DiMasi, who recently published a study that the students claim is...

The UK Times reports that pharmaceutical companies are actively lobbying to limit the release of clinical trial data to the public. Rather than limiting results and data to medical journals, new transparency initiatives are pushing for making the information publically available. The push for transparency comes in the wake of the reanalysis of the Study 329 data on paroxetine (marketed as Seroxat and Paxil), which found that the industry study had misconstrued its results.