Media

Reporting for The Intercept, Lee Fang reveals that pharma executives "have told investors that they are working actively to influence the political debate.” After...

-Buzzfeed looks at the history -- and present -- of how antipsychotic drugs became a common treatment for depression, despite their apparent lack of effectiveness.

Writing on his 1 Boring Old Man blog, Dr. Mickey Nardo reflects on the media frenzy around the RAISE study and asks why the prescription data has not been released. He adds skepticism about the political motives of the potentially overblown results, which he sees as a clear push for increased mental health funding.

“The Food and Drug Administration’s approval of pharmaceutical treatment for low sexual desire in women has launched a heated debate over the dangers and benefits of medicalizing sex,” Maya Dusenbery writes in the Pacific Standard. Is “female Viagra” a feminist victory or a product of clever faux-feminist marketing by Big Pharma?

Last week, after the US Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) made a recommendation for increased mental health and depression screening “stories in the New York Times,...

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 an open letter to all US presidential candidates published Thursday in the BMJ, a group of global health care experts assert that current research regulations allow drug companies to publish incomplete and misleading results. They ask the candidates to declare whether they support improved transparency measures that would make data on drug studies publically available and open to scrutiny.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: A number of studies have shown the significant problems that arise from financial conflicts in research. Disclosure of researchers'...

Richard Smith, the chair of the board of trustees at BMJ, penned an editorial yesterday bringing increased scrutiny to research misconduct and medical fraud in the UK. Smith identifies denial about the seriousness of the problem and the reluctance of universities to submit themselves to reviews as the two major reasons that Britain has failed to address these issues.

Last Wednesday, Sesame Street added a new character, Julia, to its roster of characters. In an online story, Julia, who has autism, meets Elmo and Abby and Elmo explains why Julia might sometimes do things a little bit differently. The story was written by Leslie Kimmerman, who has a child with autism, and the entire series will be developed in collaboration with parents, advocates, and people with autism.

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.

Vox interviews twenty scientists about their biggest gripes with the journalists who report on their studies. For example, “journalists often want clear answers to...

Listen: NPR’s On the Media talks about how bad health information ripples through the news. Gary Schwitzer of HealthNewsReview.org cautions against other problematic health reporting in a Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Health News Edition.

Early in December, HealthNewsReview.org announced receipt of a $1.3 million grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to re-start and significantly expand its operations. And in late December Retraction Watch announced that it had received $400,000 from the MacArthur Foundation. Both websites specialize in monitoring and reporting on poor practices in science, medicine and psychiatry.

-John Horgan criticizes psychiatrist Richard Friedman's effusive portrayal of a study that allegedly identified the "feel-good" gene in humans.

A "Special Communication" by HealthNewsReview.org publisher Gary Schwitzer published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that most news media present very...

In the Atlantic, Ed Yong reports that despite the lack of replicability of individual studies, when you get a pool of psychologists “betting on” the reproducibility of a study their predictions are surprisingly accurate. “Which makes me wonder: What's going on with peer review? If people know which results are really not likely to be real, why are they allowing them to be published?”

"Terrorism researchers are trying to understand how young people in Europe become radicalized, by looking for clues in the life histories of those who have committed or planned terrorist acts in recent years, left the continent to join ISIS, or are suspected of wanting to become jihadists. A mixture of sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and psychologists, such researchers are drawing on information generated by police, judicial inquiries and the media, and, in some cases, on interviews. They also study factors at play in prisons and socially-deprived areas. Some of their insights are summarized here.”

“Those who possess the data control the story.” In the wake of the reanalysis of the infamous Study 329, where scientific data claiming the antidepressant Paxil was safe and effective for teens was egregiously manipulated, researchers are pushing for open access to raw data. “The issue here, scientists argue, is that without independent confirmation, it becomes too easy to manipulate data.”

“Decisions about the effectiveness of drugs are being made with incomplete information because results of almost three-quarters of clinical trials are still not published...

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.”

-A co-founder of Retraction Watch suggests editors of scientific and medical journals could learn some things from Rolling Stone about correcting errors.

Rob Wipond takes HealthNewsReview.org to task for its coverage of a Philadelphia Inquirer article about a medical device designed for people experiencing panic. He writes that “hyperbolic psychiatric and psychological claims frequently get free passes from otherwise thoughtful medical critics.”

-Mind the Brain's James Coyne talks about why so many news stories about health and psychology studies are so bad.

Mind Hacks discusses the first historical case of a celebrity (presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964) being "diagnosed" in the media by psychiatrists and...