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Pharmalot

by Ed Silverman – April 12, 2011

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Counter Punch—January 24, 2011

by Martha Rosenberg

Even though AstraZeneca’s antipsychotic Seroquel is the fifth best-selling medication in the US according to drugs.com, exceeded only by Lipitor, Nexium, Plavix and Advair diskus, its safety, effectiveness, clinical trial and promotion records are highly checkered.

An original backer, psychiatrist Richard Borison, was sentenced to a 15-year prison sentence in 1998 for a pay-to-play Seroquel research scheme.

Its US medical director Wayne MacFadden had sexual affairs with two different women involved with Seroquel research, say published reports.

Chicago psychiatrist Michael Reinstein received $500,000 from AstraZenenca and wrote 41,000 prescriptions for Seroquel reports the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica.

Psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff who left Emory University in disgrace after a Congressional investigation for unreported pharma income, promoted Seroquel in continuing medical education courses according to the web site of psychiatrist Daniel Carlat.

Florida child psychiatrist Jorge Armenteros was chairman of the FDA committee responsible for recommending Seroquel approvals while a paid AstraZeneca speaker himself, said the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2009.

Psychiatrist Charles Schulz’ high profile pro-Seroquel presentations are suspected of being colored by his AstraZeneca income says the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

And unexplained Iraq and Afghanistan troop deaths are linked to Seroquel reported the Associated Press in August.

Originally approved for schizophrenia in 1997, Seroquel has subsequently been approved for bipolar disorder, for some groups of kids and as an add-drug for depression. This “indications creep” has mostly flown below the public’s radar. Seroquel expansion to treat children in late 2009, for example, was noted as a mere “label change” on the FDA web site. Hello?

Even without its depression indication, Seroquel is big business for AstraZeneca, earning $4.9 billion in sales in 2009. It is the drug that North Carolina’s Medicaid spends the most on: $29.4 million per year, reports the Charlotte News and Observer.

But now, as AstraZeneca rolls out its “Still Trying to Get Ahead of Your Depression” campaign, there are new questions about Seroquel’s safety and effectiveness.

According to an FDA warning letter, an AstraZeneca sales representative during an unsolicited sales call on January 3, 2008 sold Seroquel as a treatment for major depressive disorder to a physician before it was approved for MDD, an infraction which is illegal.

Once Seroquel was approved for depression (as an add-on treatment to an antidepressant for patients with major depressive disorder who not have an adequate response to antidepressant therapy), its leave-behind sheets drew another FDA warning letter.

AstraZeneca implied patients would achieve “remission” from depression with Seroquel XR (extended release) as opposed to with an antidepressant alone, says FDA — a claim not backed up by clinical experience.

Seroquel’s effect on depression has only been demonstrated in two, six-week trials FDA further said and six weeks is “not a long enough time period to adequately assess remission.” (It was approved…why?)

Also the case study of “Catherine F.” depicted in leave-behind sheets is inaccurate says FDA because it suggests Seroquel alleviates “symptoms of sadness and loss of interest when this has not been demonstrated by substantial evidence or substantial clinical experience.” (It was approved…why?)

Even AstraZeneca’s own briefing to the FDA committee in 2009 admits a “failed study” in which both Seroquel and Lexapro “failed to differentiate from placebo” which is Clinical Trial for “didn’t work.”

Nor did AstraZeneca adequately disclose Seroquel risks says FDA which include increased mortality in elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis, suicidality, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, hyperglycemia and diabetes mellitus, hyperlipidemia, weight gain and other serious side effects.

In fact, in addition to risks like cataracts, seizures and increases in blood pressure in children and adolescents, already on the Seroquel label, FDA asked AstraZeneca to add the “risk of EPS and withdrawal syndrome in neonates” a few months ago: movement disorders which can affect mothers’ babies if the mothers are taking Seroquel and stop.

But the FDA might also look at what the government’s other hand is doing. In May the Office of the Army Surgeon General’s final report on the findings of its Pain Management Task Force unabashedly hawks Seroquel for an unapproved use.

“Physicians should consider these medications for sleep disorders,” says the 163-page report,” listing Ambien and Seroquel (quetiapine) “for nightmares” even though Seroquel has never been approved for insomnia, sleep disorders or “nightmares.”

Maybe the government will send itself a warning letter.

http://www.counterpunch.org/rosenberg01242011.html

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CounterPunch New Year’s Edition
December 31, 2010 – January 2, 2011

by Martha Rosenberg

At the annual American Psychiatric Association meeting in New Orleans this summer, 200 protestors chanted “no conflicts of interest” and held up photos of individual doctors outside the convention center. Inside the hall, their charges were verified.

The meeting’s Daily Bulletin disclosed that the APA president himself, Alan Schatzberg, has 15 links to drug companies including stock ownership and serving on a speakers bureau.

Doctors on other speaker bureaus like Shire’s Ann Childress and Wyeth’s Claudio Soares gave presentations and workshops that — surprise! — extolled company drugs.

And signing books, side by side, was the duo now accused of penning an entire book for the drug industry: Alan Schatzberg and Charles Nemeroff.

This month ProPublica and the New York Times report that Schatzberg and Nemeroff’s book, Recognition and Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders: A Pharmacology Handbook for Primary Care, may be the first entirely drug industry-approved textbook ever. Published in 1999, the book’s preface says it was funded by an unrestricted education grant to Scientific Therapeutics Information through London-based GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Scientific Therapeutics Information of Springfield, NJ is the same medical publishing company that spun Vioxx.

Schatzberg was investigated by the Senate in 2008 which found “a lack of consistency” between what he earned from drug companies and what he reported to Stanford where he continues to head the psychiatry department. He owns $6 million of stock in a company he co-founded, Corcept Therapeutics, which sought FDA approval for a psychiatric drug despite Schatzberg’s APA position.

Nemeroff, for his part, left Emory University in disgrace after a 2008 Congressional investigation unearthed $1.2 million in drug industry income, his $9 million NIH grant was terminated (a rare occurrence) and he was banned from further NIH grants for two years. But he resurfaced as head of the psychiatry department at the University of Miami in 2009 after the medical school dean, Pascal Goldschmidt, was assured by crony Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), that Nemeroff could still draw NIH money, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was payback for when Nemeroff got Insel a job, say observers. Nemeroff still sits on NIH scientific panels reviewing others’ grant applications, ensuring further cronyism.

Ghostwriting, of course, solves the “Company-Says-Company’s-Product-Is-Great” problem and increases the chance of a paper’s publication in a journal. It helps “authors”‘ careers and may even spur their individual prescribing habits since studies show doctors prescribe more of a drug they are paid to promote.

But the consumer version, unbranded advertising, is also effective: radio and TV commercials posing as public service announcements that push “awareness” of diseases like ADHD, Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS) or Excessive Sleepiness (ES) and drive worriers to sites where they can self-diagnose with simple quizzes.

Meanwhile, the consumer version of bought doctors is “Astroturf” or patient front groups like the “grassroots” National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), investigated by Congress for drug industry links. These bought patients flash mob the FDA with sob stories when an expensive drug is up for approval and lobby Medicaid to not substitute less expensive drugs, inflating entitlement program and insurance premium costs for industry’s benefit.

In the war against drug industry duplicity, company employees are increasingly reporting misdeeds thanks to provisions that entitle whistleblowers to 15 and even 30 percent of fraud settlement sums, in some cases. And last month the Justice Department filed the first criminal, not civil, charges against a the drug industry operative, Lauren Stevens, a former VP and assistant general counsel at GlaxoSmithKline. But as long as politicians like former Louisiana Rep. Billy Tauzin, who headed the industry trade group PhRMA, and former CDC director Julie Gerberding, now head of Merck vaccines, are willing to parlay a career’s worth of knowledge and relationships to sell product, the government is essentially fighting itself.

Read the article here: http://www.counterpunch.org/rosenberg12312010.html

For more information on the APA/Conflicts of Interest see:

CCHR: American Psychiatric Association Called Upon to Cut Drug Company Ties and Put Lives of Children Before Profits http://www.cchrint.org/2010/05/21/apa-leaders-called-upon-to-cut-drug-company-ties-and-put-the-lives-of-children-ahead-of-personal-profits/

CCHR: DSM Panel Members Still Getting Pharma Funds http://www.cchrint.org/2010/05/21/dsm-panel-members-still-getting-pharma-funds/

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Despite promises to cut back on Pharma funds, 56% of DSM V panel members have reported industry ties— Zero improvement over the percent of DSM-IV members.

By CCHR International
May 21, 2010

Due to Senate investigations into the American Psychiatric Association, psychiatrists have promised to cut back on their conflicts of interest (pharma funds), but of the current DSM task force members, those who will be deciding on the holy grail of psychiatric disorders (DSM) and what constitutes a “mental illness” are still heavily funded by Pharma. In fact, there is no improvement over cutting down the number of panel members who are getting paid by industry over the last DSM revision in 1994. It was 56% then and its 56% now. So much for psychiatry’s promises…

Former APA president Nada Stotland stated: “We are in the midst of a revolution caused by public and legislative concern about the influence of the for-profit sector….” [Emphasis added] Part of that public pressure for the APA to disclose its conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies was driven by Lisa Cosgrove Ph.D. et al’s study of DSM-IV and DSM-IV-TR committee members, which found that of the 170 members, 56% had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry.  Pharma’s psychotropic drug profits have soared commensurately with the increased numbers of disorders voted into the DSM.

• Of the 137 DSM-V panel members who have posted disclosure statements, 56% have reported industry ties—no improvement over the percent of DSM-IV members.

• Writing in Psychiatric Times (March 6, 2010), Cosgrove and Harold J. Bursztajn, MD, stated: “Although the APA recently announced that it would phase out the visibly industry-supported educational programs, the organization has remained curiously silent about acknowledging and monitoring industry funding of the 2 philanthropic arms of the APA—the American Psychiatric Foundation (APF) and the American Psychiatric Institute for Research and Education (APIRE).”

• APF’s 15-member board of directors includes 4 high-level executives from pharmaceutical companies that either manufacture drugs recommended by APA (i.e.; in APA’s Clinical Practice Guidelines [CPG]) or have products in development targeted for mental disorders.

• Other board members include 2 more with industry ties and a senior vice president at one of the largest public relations agencies in the world, whose clients include 6 drug companies.

• APF’s corporate advisory council comprises pharmaceutical companies that contribute significant funding to APF and manufacture drugs recommended in the APA’s CPG; 6 of the companies give $40,000 “and above” per year.

• APIRE, like APF, does not require disclosure of financial conflicts of interests, yet 9 of 16 of its board members have industry ties.

• At least a quarter of the presenters at this year’s APA congress have significant pharmaceutical company ties.

The APA should sever all ties to pharmaceutical company interests. The US Senate Finance Committee has investigated at least a dozen APA psychiatrists over their undisclosed financial ties to drug companies, including:

Investigated - Alan Schatzberg, APA President: Owned $6 million equity in and as co-founder of drug developer Corcept Therapeutics while principle investigator in an NIH-funded, Stanford-based study of Corcept’s drug mifepristone. Schatzberg initiated the patent application on mifepristone to “treat psychotic depression” in 1997. In 2008, after months of Congressional scrutiny, Schatzberg stepped down from his position as principal investigator in the study.


Investigated – Joseph Biederman: Chief of the Program in Pediatric Psychopharmacology, Massachusetts General Hospital, he earned $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers between 2000 and 2007, most of which was not disclosed to Harvard University officials. In March 2009, court documents showed Biederman promised Johnson & Johnson in advance that his studies of their antipsychotic Risperidone would prove effective when used on preschool age children.


Investigated - Melissa DelBello: Research psychiatrist, University of Cincinnati failed to disclose all her Pharma earnings. In 2002, she was the lead author of a study that reported patients benefited from Seroquel by AstraZeneca, which paid her $180,000. She disclosed receiving $100,000 from the company between 2005 and 2007, but federal investigators discovered it was more than double that—$238,000.


Investigated - Frederick Goodwin: Former NIMH director, Goodwin earned at least $1.3 million between 2000 and 2007 for marketing lectures to physicians on behalf of drug makers, which he did not reveal to the producers of “The Infinite Mind” that he hosted on the National Public Radio during its 10-year run. NPR removed the program.


Investigated - Charles Nemeroff: Perhaps the most egregious case exposed was that of Dr. Nemeroff, chair of Emory University’s department of psychiatry and, along with Schatzberg, coeditor of the influential Textbook of Psychopharmacology. He received more than $960,000 from GSK, but reported to Emory $35,000.  He earned a further $2.8 million from various drug makers but failed to report at least $1.2 million. Nemeroff resigned his position at Emory in 2008.


Investigated - Martin Keller: Professor of Psychiatry at Brown University. His (and others’) Study 329 (ghostwritten by a GSK rep.) on Paxil use in children allegedly misrepresented data and suppressed information linking Paxil to suicidal tendencies. Keller didn’t disclose the full extent of his financial ties with companies to medical journals that published his research. In another matter, following a criminal investigation, Brown University returned $300,170 to the state of Massachusetts for research Keller’s department never performed. Keller stepped down as chair of psychiatry at Brown.


Investigated - Augustus John Rush: Former Vice-Chairman of the Dept. of Clinical Sciences at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He reported only $3,000 of the nearly $18,000 that Eli Lilly paid him in 2001.  Between 2000 and 2007, he failed to report another $12,000 from various drug companies.


Investigated - Karen Wagner: Professor, University of Texas Medical Branch failed to disclose more than $160,000 in payments from GSK, reporting only $18,000. Wagner worked on NIH-funded studies on the use of Paxil to treat teen depression and was a co-researcher on Study 329 (see Keller), for which she was paid more than $18,000. In 2002, Eli Lily paid her over $11,000, which was not disclosed.


Investigated – Thomas Spencer: Assistant Director of the Pediatric Psychopharmacology Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, reportedly failed to disclose at least $1 million in earnings from drug companies between 2000 and 2007.


Investigated - Timothy Wilens: Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School allegedly failed to report he had earned at least $1.6 million from drug makers.

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by CCHR International

An ongoing U.S. Senate investigation headed by Senator Charles Grassley has  sought disclosure of pharmaceutical funding paid to researchers, physicians,  medical schools and medical journals.  Some of the nation’s most prominent psychiatrists have now been exposed for extensive conflicts of interest amounting to millions in undisclosed pharmaceutical funding, including Dr. Charles Nemeroff, Dr. Joseph Biederman, Dr. Melissa DelBello, Dr. Timothy Wilens, Dr. Thomas Spencer, Dr. Alan Schatzberg, Dr. Martin Keller, Dr. A. John Rush, Dr. Karen Wagner, Dr. Jeffrey Bostic and Dr. Frederick Goodwin — many of which serve as advisory board members to mental illness “advocacy groups” which are now also the subject of the Senate investigation for their undisclosed pharmaceutical funding.

The majority of the public may or may not be familiar with these so-called mental health advocacy organizations, such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD) or the myriad of bipolar, depression or ADHD “support groups” that are inundating the internet.

But they need to be.

These are groups operating under the guise of advocates for the “mentally ill,” which in reality are heavily funded pharmaceutical front groups – lobbying and working on state and federal laws which effect the entire nation — from our elderly in nursing homes to our military, pregnant women, nursing mothers and school children. Presenting themselves as patient advocacy groups is highly disingenuous not only to their membership, many of which may have a sincere desire to help a loved one or a family member with mental problems, but to legislators, the press and the American public — for they have consistently lobbied for legislation that benefits the mental health and pharmaceutical industries which fund them, and not patients they claim to represent.

Certainly any organization claiming to be for the rights of patients diagnosed mentally ill would have as their primary goal, full informed consent in the field of mental health – including full and complete disclosure of all drug risks, the right to refuse treatment, the right to know that psychiatric diagnoses are not medical conditions (evident by the fact there is not one confirmatory medical/scientific test). Above all such groups would provide patients with an abundance of information on non-harmful, non- drug, medical solutions and options considering the dangerous and well documented risks of psychiatric drugs by international drug regulatory agencies.

These groups do not.

A patients rights group for the mentally ill would never endorse something as absurd and obviously dangerous as giving electroshock to pregnant women, nor condone schools being able to require children to take a psychiatric drug as a condition of attending school. Furthermore, they would never be opposed to the FDA actually doing its job and finally issuing long overdue warnings that antidepressants can cause children to commit suicide, or issue warnings that ADHD drugs have serious and even deadly side effects. Yet these are just some of the actions condoned and promoted by these so-called patients rights groups.

As another example take the federally proposed bill, The Mothers Act; a previous version of this bill called on using a method of “screening” pregnant women and new mothers called EPDS, a screening method documented to triple the number of women diagnosed with Postpartum depression, according to a study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology. The Scandinavian Journal of Public Health stated that EPDS screening was unethical and should not be used. None of the so called advocacy groups for the mentally ill had any objections to this bill whatsoever, or endorsing such an unethical screening tool. They supported it. The bill would have passed with no objections from them whatsoever, if not for the dedication of real advocacy groups with no vested interests (ties to Pharma) opposing language in this bill that would have led to women being falsely diagnosed and put on dangerous psychiatric drugs to “treat” them, unnecessarily placing new mothers and their infants at great risk.

To put it simply, these groups are not what they appear to be. Yet their influence over legislation, lobbying, drug regulation (or lack thereof), and public relations campaigns is substantial and effects the entire nation. For they claim to be the voice of the “mentally ill.” But are they? Or are they the result of a brilliant marketing/lobbying campaign designed to benefit the industry that funds them—the Psycho/Pharmaceutical industry.

To find out how it all started click here: http://www.cchrint.org/psycho-pharmaceutical-front-groups/

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John Dorschner
The Miami Herald
November 6, 2009

Charles Nemeroff, an Atlanta psychiatrist who was the subject of a Senate investigation concerning huge sums he received from drug companies, has been named chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Miami.

Last year Nemeroff, as the top psychiatrist at Emory University, was the focus of an investigation by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who said he was concerned about the millions the psychiatrist received from drug companies while conducting supposedly unbiased research for the National Institutes of Health on drugs made by the companies he was receiving money from.

On Thursday, Pascal Goldschmidt, dean of UM medical school, called Nemeroff “an exceptional psychiatrist and an exceptional scientist who has one issue in which he recognizes he made a mistake,” in not telling Emory how much he was getting from drug makers.

Goldschmidt said he had read investigative reports from Emory about Nemeroff’s activities and Emory found nothing to indicate that payments the psychiatrist received had in any way influenced his research results.

Elsewhere, opinions are divided.

The former head of psychiatry at Duke University told The Miami Herald Thursday that Nemeroff was “economical with the truth” and his work can’t be trusted, while the leader of the Columbia University psychiatry program said Nemeroff was a top-flight scientist and he had never seen any bias in his work.

Read entire article: http://www.miamiherald.com/business/story/1319569.html

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John Dorschner
The Miami Herald
November 5, 2009

Charles Nemeroff, an Atlanta psychiatrist who was the subject of a Senate investigation concerning huge sums he received from drug companies, is being named chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Miami medical school.

Last year Nemeroff, as chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Emory University, was the intense focus of an investigation by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who said he was concerned about the money the psychiatrist received from drug companies while conducting supposedly unbiased research for the National Institutes of Health on drugs made by the companies he was receiving money from.

On Thursday, Pascal Goldschmidt, dean of UM medical school, called Nemeroff “an extraordinary psychiatrist and scientist. . . . He got into serious trouble on disclosure on conflict of interest.”

Goldschmidt said he had read investigative reports from Emory about Nemeroff’s activities and found nothing to indicate that payments the psychiatrist received had in any way influenced his research results.

In a telephone interview at mid-day Thursday, Nemeroff, 60, told The Miami Herald he was excited to be coming to Miami. “I think it’s going to be a top-10 school.”

A front-page report by The New York Times in October 2008 said that congressional investigators found Nemeroff — “one of the nation’s most influential psychiatrists” — had received $2.8 million in consulting deals with drug makers over seven years and failed to report at least $1.2 million of that to Emery University.

Read entire article: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/breaking-news/story/1318257.html

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Bob Grant
TheScientist.com
November 2, 2009

The Emory University psychiatry researcher who failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in pharmaceutical company payouts while receiving millions of dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health to study the company’s anti-depressant drugs is leaving the university, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Charles Nemeroff,  a renowned depression researcher, failed to disclose to Emory approximately $800,000 in payments he received from drug maker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) while he was the principal investigator (PI) on a multi-million dollar grant from the NIH to study five GSK antidepressants. Amid an investigation conducted by Emory, Nemeroff stepped down from his position as chairman of the psychiatry department last October. Later that month, the psychiatrist stepped down as PI from the $9.3 million NIH grant as the Senate probed his failure to disclose income from GSK, and the NIH froze funding on the five-year grant.

Read entire article: http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/56127/

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By John Breeding
Psychologist, Author, The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses
October 14, 2009

The bill forbids federal funding for universal or mandatory mental health screening, and also forbids money for any educational or other government agency that would use a parent’s refusal to consent to their child’s screening as basis for a charge of child neglect or abuse.

A little recent history is relevant. On April 29, 2002, President George Bush created the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. In 2003, this industry-studded commission presented their recommendations for the reform of the United States mental health system.

“To aid in transforming the system,” the authors of the report wanted to do many things, including:

• Improve and expand school mental health programs.
• Screen for co-occurring mental and substance use disorders and link with integrated treatment strategies.
• Screen for mental disorders in primary health care, across the lifespan, and connect to treatment and supports.

This rhetoric serves to hide the truth that New Freedom is better called No Freedom or New Intrusion, and that mental health screening really means mass marketing and target recruitment of a captive population.

By the time of these New Freedom Commission recommendations, there already existed very large numbers of citizens around the country wising up to the extraordinary intrusion of psychiatry into our schools, as demonstrated in the first four years of this millennium by a number of resolutions, education department statements and state laws, all defending a parent’s right to make treatment decisions for a child without coercion, and a child’s right to education without psychiatric labeling and drugs.

Through 2003, there had been at least 46 state bills or resolutions supporting parental choice, in 28 states, that had either passed or were still pending action across the United States.  For example, Connecticut, Minnesota and Texas had passed laws explicitly stating that a parent’s refusal to consent to the administration of a psychotropic drug to a child does not constitute neglect, therefore is not in itself grounds for Child Protective Services (CPS) investigation.  Other states have passed related laws either monitoring or curbing CPS policy in this area.

Many states are pursuing related legislation as the wave of activity in support of parental choice continues to expand.  Texas law now prohibits school personnel from suggesting a diagnosis or recommending a psychotropic drug to a parent for their child.  The public will is clearly for the schools to educate, not medicate, and for the state to allow privacy and autonomy to parents and families.  At a federal level the fight over the Child Medication Safety Act was eventually won so that nowhere in the country is it legal to require a psychiatric controlled substance as a condition of attending school.

Ron Paul has been a key leader in this effort for some time.  On October 6, 2004, he introduced an earlier incarnation of his current Parental Consent Act.  This one, aptly titled the Let Parents Raise Their Kids Act, also attempted to forbid federal funds from being used for any universal or mandatory mental-health screening of students without the express, written, voluntary, informed consent of their parents or legal guardians.

Since that time, the fight has only intensified.  In 2005 in Texas, for example, we fought tooth and nail to the bitter end to defeat a bill that would have initiated mental health screening in schools throughout Texas.  Since we have defeated them consistently, this session they tried to get a pilot program approved for San Antonio and we defeated that as well, but the psychiatric and pharmaceutical lobbies are relentless.  PsychSearch.net provides one of the best websites on mental health screening and the ongoing resistance.

We have been aided by our awareness.  Made possible largely by the work of Pennsylvania whistleblower Allen Jones, we know that many of the New Freedom commissioners are linked directly or indirectly to the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), which provides formulas recommending specific psychotropic drugs to treat various “mental illnesses.”  It has been revealed that TMAP pushed an off-label drug marketing scheme that appears to skirt federal law.  We know, therefore, that this commission’s recommendations are intended to encourage an expansion of the fact that “appropriate services” in today’s psychiatric world means psychotropic drugs; there are already millions upon millions of school-age children on psychiatric drugs.

Senator Charles Grassley’s work outing the severe ethical financial conflicts of so many psychiatric industry spokespersons makes it a little easier to challenge these things.  For example, it tends to impress legislators when they hear that three psychiatry department chairs—Charles Nemeroff of Emory University ($1 million from GlaxoSmithKline alone), Martin Keller of Brown University (associated with a severely compromised drug trial) and Alan Shatzberg of Stanford (who was principal investigator on a drug developed by a company in which he owned $6 million of stock) have all recently resigned their positions as a result of Grassley’s investigation.

The very high number of false positives in mental health screening is good data.  In one study at Columbia University, the authors concluded that use of the Columbia Suicide Screen would result in 84 non-suicidal teens being referred for further evaluation for every 16 youths correctly identified.  It also helps to know that these type programs tend not to work anyway.  For example, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) found that screening for suicide risk does not reduce suicide attempts or mortality.

Finally, the facts about the severe dangers and lack of efficacy of the various types of psychiatric drugs gets attention once the truth is made known.

I consider this to represent a tragic situation, and a clear and present danger to our children.  Here is a pledge that thousands specifically signed and that so many more are acting on in the concerted challenges around the country to this scourge:

We promise to actively resist further intrusion of psychiatry into the public schools, and will not cooperate in any way with those who act as agents of this wrong-headed government initiative.  We do not now and will not later consent to the psychiatric or psychological testing of our children by those who act as agents to implement New Freedom recommendations for universal mental health screening of our children.

The Parental Consent Act of 2009 is a great idea. Passing this bill in Washington would make a significant difference in protecting children and families against further intrusion of psychiatry into the schools. I know it would also make this Texas activist’s life a little easier!

John Breeding, Ph.D. has been a counseling psychologist in Austin, Texas for 25 years. He is the director of Texans For Safe Education, a citizens group dedicated to challenging the ever-increasing role of psychiatric drugs in schools.  He is the author of numerous articles and four books including: The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses and True Nature and Great Misunderstandings: On How We Care For Our Children According To Our Understanding.

Click here to read The Parental Consent Act

Contact your member of Congress to support The Parental Consent Act. To find your Representative and get their contact information, go to http://www.congress.org/congressorg/directory/congdir.tt to look them up (you need to enter your zip code).

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