The Daily Telegraph
By Rebecca Smith
February 7, 2010

Tens of thousands of vulnerable dementia patients are being prescribed ‘chemical cosh’ drugs in hospital wards in a ’scandalous abuse’ of the elderly, ten leading health organisations have said in a letter to The Daily Telegraph.

Three quarters of nurses have seen people with dementia in general wards in hospital prescribed antipsychotic drugs that are known to double the risk of death and triple the risk of a stroke in these patients, research has shown.

It is the first time the scale of the abuse in hospital wards is exposed, following warnings that 100,000 dementia patients in care homes are prescribed the drugs leading to the deaths of 23,000 a year.

Ten leading charities, carers groups and experts have written to The Daily Telegraph saying: “We cannot stand by while this scandalous abuse of vulnerable citizens continues.”

Neil Hunt, Chief Executive of Alzheimer’s Society said: “The massive over prescription of antipsychotics to people with dementia is an abuse of human rights, causing serious side effects and increasing risk of death. These powerful drugs should only be used in a small number of cases. The Government must take action to ensure that these drugs are only ever used as a last resort.”

They have called on the government to publish its long-overdue review of the use of antipsychotics which ministers promised would be out in May of this year.

Read entire article:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6264962/Scandalous-abuse-of-the-elderly-prescribed-antipsychotics-in-hospital-exposed.html

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By CCHR
February 5, 2010

With drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) now stating it will abandon future antidepressant research, one can only wonder if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) noted GSK’s CEO Andrew Witty’s admission that it is “hard to prove that a depression drug is working” because “patient improvement is measured by subjective mood surveys, and not by the clear-cut blood tests and biological measures used in other diseases.”

To put this in perspective, the head of GSK is pointing out an obvious flaw in the psycho/pharmaceutical cash cow of psychiatric drugs.  There is no way to prove if a drug is working because there are no lab tests to prove anyone has a mental disorder in the first place—unlike medical diseases where blood and lab tests can show the effect of any drug upon the disease.

Given this statement, the next logical question is how did the FDA ever approve any psychiatric drug as safe and effective when the drug makers admit there is no proof of efficacy, only “subjective mood surveys.”

It seems the drug companies are catching on while the FDA is still promoting junk science in order to grant drug approval.

And that’s on top of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) landmark study published last month that found antidepressants no more effective than placebo. Add to that, 40% of antidepressant clinical trials have not been published because of negative results—they failed to show any significant benefit.  So, even with a “subjective mood survey,” they can’t get the drug to make the mark.  And the studies that did “prove” it did so, as Newsweek put it, for “the same reason why Disney’s Dumbo could initially fly only with a feather clutched in his trunk—believing makes it so.”

The FDA says: “Drugs must undergo a rigorous evaluation of safety, quality, and effectiveness before they can be sold.” Clearly, there is nothing rigorous about testing efficacy in antidepressants.  GSK’s confession is on par with former American Psychiatric Association president, Steven Sharfstein admitting that there is no lab test to confirm a chemical imbalance in the brain.  Reiterating this was his APA cohort Mark Graff, who told CBS Studio 2 that this theory was “probably drug industry derived”—in other words, a marketing ploy in the same vein as antidepressants are “effective.”

John Swann, Ph.D., historian at the FDA, once said: “To establish fraud, the bureau had to show that the manufacturer knew the product was worthless, and this proved difficult in many cases.”[i]

Well, FDA, if a drug company can admit what the FDA has known all along—that the efficacy of an antidepressant or any psychiatric drug is entirely subjective and, therefore, not based on science, how can the FDA continue to approve and condone the use of these drugs as “safe and effective?”

Instead of the potential fraud of a manufacturer, a more pertinent question we should be asking is this:
What if the government agency in charge of approving drugs, the FDA, knew a product was worthless and approved its use anyway? What happens then?

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Wall Street Journal
By Jeanne Whalen
February 5, 2010

GlaxoSmithKline PLC said it will stop research into new antidepressants and focus on diseases for which it believes it can develop more valuable drugs, a major shift for a company that developed some of the biggest-selling antidepressants of the past 20 years.

Profits at the U.K. drug giant, which posted a 66% increase in fourth-quarter earnings Thursday, were long fueled by the antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin, which at their peak generated billions of dollars a year in sales. Similar medicines, such as Eli Lilly & Co.’s Prozac and Pfizer Inc.’s Zoloft, also generated big sales for those companies.

However, low-cost generic copies have eroded demand for name-brand antidepressants, which accounted for just 2.3% of Glaxo’s total sales last year, down from 14% in 2002. Chief Executive Andrew Witty said Thursday that the company thinks further investment in the market wouldn’t be prudent.

Part of the reason is financial risk. Clinical trials of antidepressants are among the “most expensive and highest-risk” of all drug trials, Mr. Witty said, because companies often don’t know until the end of very large studies whether a drug works. It is also hard to prove that a depression drug is working, he said, because patient improvement is measured by subjective mood surveys, and not by the clear-cut blood tests and biological measures used in other diseases.

That’s a drawback in an era when insurers and other health-care payers want to see clear value for their money, Mr. Witty said.

Payers “want big benefits to make it worth their while to invest their resources,” he said, adding that Glaxo would scrap research into pain drugs for the same reasons, focusing instead on diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and a clutch of rare diseases.

Read entire article:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704041504575044901266169316.html

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The Brooklyn Rail
By Kaitlin Bell
February 2010

Gary Greenberg opens his new history of depression with a riveting tale of scientific ingenuity. A young, unknown marine biologist with an interest in mussels happens to discover the neurotransmitter serotonin and helps spur the antidepressant revolution. Lest we get too excited, though, Greenberg deflates our hopes just a few pages in.  Great science stories involve chance discoveries that change our everyday lives, he says—but this is not the kind of story he is going to tell.

Instead, the story that dominates Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Disease is of scientific exuberance run amok, of coincidences and hasty conclusions, of a lust for money and for control over what Greenberg aptly describes as the landscape of mental suffering. Greenberg is outraged that “the depression doctors,” as he ominously terms them, have cornered the market on Americans’ internal anguish and have managed to convince millions of people that their unhappiness is actually a disease with a simple cause—a chemical imbalance—and a magic-bullet cure. It’s especially infuriating because this notion isn’t based in fact; it’s just a story we have allowed the medical establishment to tell us. There is no biochemical marker for depression, no good way to tell who is and who isn’t depressed. The tools doctors use to diagnose depression, as well as the other varieties of mental illness, are based on symptoms alone—whether someone is eating or sleeping more or less than usual, for example, or suffering from excessive guilt, or engaging in too much self-criticism.  Most of what’s diagnosed as depression is, in other words, nothing more than the name our society gives to a particular kind of emotional and mental suffering considered worthy of fixing.

In one sense, Greenberg has reclaimed the narrative very effectively. He has produced a tightly woven history showing that the medical establishment, despite claims to the contrary, knows almost nothing about the causes of depression from a scientific, biochemical, or neurological perspective.

Read entire article:  http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/02/express/a-frustrating-mess

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JBS.org
By Beverly K. Eakman
February 2, 2010

We’ve all heard of “urban sprawl.” But there is another kind of “sprawl” Americans should find more worrisome: legislative sprawl.

Mental health parity is one such example. Government-mandated parity of mental and physical ailments for insurance coverage is a back-door route to nationalized health care. Special interests have been pushing government to implement parity for years and last Friday, January 29, the Obama Administration acquiesced. Health plans will henceforth be required to provide (not merely “offer”) mental-health benefits that contain no zingers, such as separate annual deductibles or lesser rates for psychiatrists and social workers.  Instead, according to Andrew Sperling of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), health insurers will be obliged to give the same level of coverage for treatment of emotional angst “as they do for cancer, diabetes and heart disease.” Mental health has morphed into a cottage industry with scores of advocating organizations and lobbyists — NAMI, the American Psychiatric Association, Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorders (CHADD), the National Education Association and, of course, pharmaceutical companies. Industry bigwigs have repeatedly insisted that mental-health issues are no different than physical illnesses. The problem is that one cannot verify a mental illness — not with an X-ray, a blood test, a urinalysis or by any other means. Unlike brain injuries, Alzheimer’s and other clear-cut brain impairments due to strokes, high fevers and birth defects, mental illness per se is purely subjective. Perhaps someday researchers will discover issues at the cellular level that definitively cause a certain subset of behaviors, or which exacerbate stress, but at the moment they cannot. So it is no wonder that the various medications and therapies directed at curing, or even alleviating, emotional distress have virtually no track record of success.

Read entire article:  http://www.jbs.org/jbs-news-feed/5917-legislative-sprawl-mandating-mental-health-coverage

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Bloomberg.com
By Jef Feeley and Margaret Cronin Fisk
February 3, 2010

AstraZeneca Plc is facing as many as 26,000 lawsuits over its antipsychotic drug Seroquel as the drugmaker prepares for its first jury trial over claims the medicine causes diabetes, according to court filings.

Attorneys for AstraZeneca, the U.K.’s second-largest drugmaker, met with plaintiffs’ lawyers in court-ordered mediation sessions last month to discuss a possible settlement of the Seroquel cases, according to court filings. Consumers’ lawyers said they had about 26,000 cases in their inventories, Stephen Saltzburg, a George Washington University Law School professor who served as mediator, said in the filing.

“I wish there were a magic wand that could be waived to settle all Seroquel cases instantly,” Saltzburg said in the filing. “Such wand does not exist.”

AstraZeneca’s stock fell last week after the drugmaker’s sales forecast and stock-buyback plan disappointed some analysts and fourth-quarter profit missed estimates. The company plans to buy back as much as $1 billion of shares this year, officials said Jan. 28.

The company said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week it faces more than 25,000 claims that Seroquel caused diabetes.

Read entire article:  http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a6MfYbj9JtRc&pos=7

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Irish Times
By Carl O’Brien
February 2, 2010

A major debate is unfolding over the use of forced ECTon psychiatric patients

SHOULD A mentally ill patient in distress be forced to undergo electric shock treatment against his or her will?

It’s a question which goes to the heart of a growing debate over one of the most controversial and invasive procedures used in psychiatric care.

Rightly or wrongly, no other treatment arouses as much fear as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Depending on who you talk to, ECT is an effective and fast-acting treatment for severe depressive disorders, or it is a potentially dangerous procedure unsupported by research and whose side effects include long-term memory loss.

The growing recognition of patients’ human rights, as well as lobbying by organised advocacy groups, means the issue is now on the political agenda. But the debate is wider than just use of this procedure; it also touches on the key question of just how much power and responsibility should we place in the hands of consultant psychiatrists?

Read entire article:  http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/health/2010/0202/1224263563057.html

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WHYY News and Information
By Kerry Grens
February 1, 2010

Last year, several federal juries in Philadelphia returned the largest ever settlements against drug companies. These lawsuits, which resulted in billions in fines, were spurred by a handful of whistleblowers. WHYY’s Kerry Grens looks at the growing phenomenon of the whistleblower suit.

Allen Jones comes across as …. intense. He lives in a cabin he built in the woods of Snyder County Pennsylvania. He speaks in a very direct and exacting manner. He smokes, and runs his hand through his hair when he gets lost in his thoughts.

Eight years ago, Jones worked as an investigator in Pennsylvania’s Office of the Inspector General.

Jones: An issue landed on my desk involving the state pharmacist Stephen Fiorello.

Jones was asked to look into payments Fiorello had received from pharmaceutical companies. To Jones, it seemed obvious. The payments involved a conflict of interest verging on crime.

Jones: As all of this began to emerge, I began to press my supervisor to broaden the investigation from a personnel issue into a fraud issue and to look more closely at what the drug companies were doing.

Read entire article:  http://whyy.org/cms/news/health-science/2010/02/01/why-people-blow-the-whistle-and-what-they-get-out-of-it/29471

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The Huffington Post
By Irving Kirsch, Ph.D.
January 29, 2010

Antidepressants are supposed to be the magic bullet for curing depression. But are they? I used to think so. As a clinical psychologist, I used to refer depressed clients to psychiatric colleagues to have them prescribed. But over the past decade, researchers have uncovered mounting evidence that they are not. It seems that we have been misled. Depression is not a brain disease, and chemicals don’t cure it.

My awareness that the chemical cure of depression is a myth began in 1998, when Guy Sapirstein and I set out to assess the placebo effect in the treatment of depression. Instead of doing a brand new study, we decided to pool the results of previous studies in which placebos had been used to treat depression and analyze them together. What we did is called a meta-analysis, and it is a common technique for making sense of the data when a large number of studies have been done to answer a particular question.

It is rare for a study to focus on the placebo effect–or on the effect of the simple passage of time, for that matter. So where were we to find our placebo data and no-treatment data? We found our placebo data in clinical studies of antidepressants. All told, we analyzed 38 published clinical trials involving more than 3,000 depressed patients. What we found came as a big surprise. It turned out that 75 percent of the antidepressant effect was also produced by placebos – sugar pills with no active ingredients that are used to control the effects of hope and expectation in clinical trials. In other words, most of the improvement seen in patients given antidepressants was a placebo effect.

Read entire article:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/irving-kirsch-phd/antidepressants-the-emper_b_442205.html

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BBC News
January 26, 2010

The marketing team sued over a drug’s alleged side effects tried to suppress key data, an ex-employee has claimed.

Seroquel’s former UK medical adviser told the BBC he was pressured to approve promotional material which said weight gain was not an issue.

Maker AstraZeneca, which faces fresh legal action next month, said it took concerns about its conduct seriously.

In the same programme, the British Medical Journal editor urged that the medicine licensing system be reviewed.

Dr Fiona Godlee said industry should no longer provide the evaluations of its own drugs which the licensing body considered.

‘Job threat’

Thousands of patients are suing AstraZeneca in US courts, claiming the anti-psychotic drug Seroquel caused weight gain and diabetes.

The patients allege Seroquel, its second biggest selling drug worth $4.5bn (£2.7bn) a year, was marketed without adequate warning about possible side effects such as massive weight gain and the development of diabetes. However, this is denied by the company.

Read entire article:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8478924.stm

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