Tag: research ethics

Dan Markingson was a 26-year-old mentally ill young man who violently killed himself in 2004 while enrolled in a drug-sponsored study of atypical antipsychotics among persons experiencing psychosis for the first time. Highly vulnerable individuals like Markingson should not be taken advantage of in the name of scientific research, and inability to protect such vulnerable subjects compromises the integrity of research.

From the New York Post: "'Three Identical Strangers' chronicles a story so wild that, as Shafran says in the film, 'I wouldn’t believe if...

In this piece for Medscape, Jodi S. Cohen chronicles the research malpractice case of child psychiatrist Mani Pavuluri, who put vulnerable children at serious risk...

An investigation exposes violations to research ethics, finding that researchers failed to disclose risks and even misled government agencies.

From Ars Technica: Psychologist Nicolas Guéguen's numerous research studies in the field of social psychology have yielded results that demonstrate and fuel binary models of...

From City Pages: In a 2014 University of Minnesota research scandal, a young man was coerced into an experimental drug study conducted by his psychiatrist that...

From The New York Times: The Department of Health and Human Services's Office for Human Research Protections recently revised its rules for social science research. Studies...

Sheila Kaplan for STAT News: “The modern history of science is littered with studies in which participants were harmed because researchers failed to take...

While clinical trials make up the “bedrock of evidence-based medicine” in other specialties, psychiatry faces a number of both ethical and scientific problems related to its use of randomized control trials. According to a new editorial in The Lancet Psychiatry, the field of psychiatry research has particular problems with ethical issues in recruitment, inaccurate classification systems, and controversial placebo comparisons, and then, once the studies are finished, it often remains unclear what the “outcomes actually mean for people’s lives.”

The University of Minnesota recently announced that it is ending the controversial practice of recruiting study participants from patients involuntarily being held in their psychiatric unit. In a commentary for Minnesota’s Star Tribune, bioethicist and MIA contributor Carl Elliot reports that the university has still not apologized to the patient who spoke out against this practice. Instead, “the university has done its best to discredit him.”

In the Atlantic, Cari Romm describes “what it is like to earn a living as a research subject in clinical trials.” “Phase 1 trials are almost always where the money is,” she writes, but they are “also the least regulated” and “companies aren’t legally required to register a trial with Clinicaltrials.gov.” “It seems to me like if you were considering signing up for one of these things, you would at least want to know the data that’s out there about [safety],” said Carl Elliott, an author for MIA and expert on the ethics of human subject research.