Mad in America

This is a blood drenched stain upon our times and society; taking a lie, and then spinning it into a false truth through deception, marketing, & buying influence...Those vested don't want to hear the truth...it's shatters their faith in medicine, it's shakes the very foundation of this cleverly taught/crafted false belief system.

There is a trillion dollar industry banking that society can't handle the truth. Far to many will unfortunately continue accepting a lie in it's place because the alternative to them is just so startling that it's virtually unfathomable.

The role of Pharma on academic society has been an issue throughout my 25 year career in psychiatry. There is relentless pressure to adopt new, more-expensive drugs - and finding head to head trials of newer agents vs. older is very difficult - sometimes when the methodology is examined, one finds evidence of what appears to be frank dishonesty.

There is, finally , growing awareness of this problem. witness the New England Journal of Medicine 2008 report on "selective publication of antidepressant trials and it's influence on apparent efficacy"

But the corruption of the "scientific" process runs very deep. Clinicians have slender resources for truly un-biased information.

The Amer. Acad Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Psychopharm conference this November seemed to me to reflect commercial bias in a level I found unsettling -given that AACAP has long been a refuge where quality of care has tended to come first.

As the Director of the Office of Communications and Public Affairs for the American Psychiatric Association, I was extremely disappointed to see false charges by the New York Times repeated here by Robert Whitaker. When we were contacted by the Times, we did a thorough investigation of the entire publishing process for the book, Recognition and Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders: A Psychopharmachology Handbook for Primary Care, which was published in 1999. We looked at correspondence with the authors and the editorial services company that assisted them, reviewers' comments, drafts and edits, the publishing contract and everything else we could get our hands on. What we found was clear: the book was not ghostwritten. The grant given by Smith Kline Beechum (now GlaxoSmithKline) to a company called Scientific Therapeutics Information, Inc.,which provided editorial services but did not in any way ghostwrite the book. The authors did not receive a penny from SKB, as Mr. Whitaker suggests. STI did submit a proposed outline and a sample chapter for the book, but very little of their original suggestions made it into the final product. In addition, the book was reviewed by eight independent reviewers, who found nothing biased about the book or troubling about the publishing process. If the book had been ghostwrittn by GSK, it would be an egregious act indeed. However, The New York Times and Mr. Whitaker got it wrong. The American Psychiatric Association would never have published a book that was ghostwritten by a pharmaceutical company.

But you can see where we'd be inclined to believe Whitaker and the NYT. This conclusion is just not so far beyond the pale, when you look at the larger context of the history of psychiatry. I don't envy YOUR job.

It should be noted that On Wednesday, December 8, the New York Times issued a formal correction to its erroneous charges that the book Robert Whitaker refers to was ghostwritten. The correction is as follows:

A headline on Nov. 30 with an article about SmithKline Beecham’s role in the publication of a book about treating psychiatric disorders overstated SmithKline’s actions. While documents show that SmithKline (now known as GlaxoSmithKline) hired a writing company for the book, they do not indicate that the company wrote the book for the authors, Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff and Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg. The article also described incorrectly, in some editions, events outlined in a letter from the writing company to Dr. Nemeroff. The correspondence proposed a timeline for the writing company to furnish the doctors and SmithKline with draft text and final page proofs for approval; the letter did not say that the company had already provided those materials for final approval. And the article misstated the context under which Dr. David A. Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, commented about the book’s production. The letter and other documents were described to him; he did not personally review the documents.

I hope that the New York Times and Psychology Today will be more careful in the future when making such serious charges against publishers and authors. Although such conspiracy theories of books being ghostwritten by pharmaceutical companies may be temporarily gratifying, that does not make them true.