Posts Tagged ‘psychiatrists’

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Pharma-Funded Psychiatrists Behind Bogus Child ‘Bi-Polar’ Epidemic- Disciplined for Conflicts of Interest

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

Harvard Psychiatrists Disciplined for Conflicts of Interest

Alliance for Human Research Protection – July 21, 2011

by Vera Sherav

Psychiatrist Joseph Biederman was funded millions by Pharma while promoting child "bipolar" disorder

The primary promoters–inventors, one might say– of diagnosing children with “bipolar” disorder, who for over a decade, aggressively promoted the biopolar diagnosis and use of antipsychotics in children, were disciplined by Harvard University and its affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

An investigation, prompted by Sen. Charles Grassely, was conducted by Harvard University-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. It concluded (earlier this month) that psychiatrist Joseph Biederman and two of his proteges, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens -each of who failed to disclose millions of dollars they had each received from the makers of antipsychotics, the drugs they promoted for the treatment of bipolar in children–had indeed violated the University’s/ and hospital’s conflict of interest reporting  standards.

The three wrote a mea culpa letter stating “we want to offer our sincere apologies…” acknowledging “our mistakes…”

However, no mention was made anywhere about the profound consequences of these psychiatritsts’ commercially-driven clinical recommendations. No mention about the corruption of the scientific literature, about clinical practice that deviated from the Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm,” nor was any mention made about the harm suffered by children whose doctors were misled about the safety and efficacy of highly toxic drugs.

Child psychiatrists and pediatricians throughout the US were guided by these exceedingly influential Harvard psychiatrists.

As Sen. Chuck Grassley noted in 2008 in the Congressional Record, “they are some of the top psychiatrists in the country, and their research is some of the most important in the field. {But] They have also taken millions of dollars from the drug companies.”

The companies that paid them millions include: Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

The Senator brought public attention–and to Harvard University administrators’ attention–the financial conflicts of interest, “Out of concern about the relationship between this money and their research.”

Indeed, documents uncovered during litigation confirmed that the research was scientifically corrupt and commercially-driven. The New York Times reported that Dr. Biederman promised Johnson a& Johnson that a study (yet to be conducted) in preschool children who would be given the company’s antipsychotic, Risperdal (risperidone) “will support the safety and effectiveness of Risperdal in this age group.”

“The psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Biederman, outlined plans to test Johnson & Johnson’s drugs in presentations to company executives. One slide referred to a proposed trial in preschool children of risperidone, an antipsychotic drug made by the drug company. The trial, the slide stated, “will support the safety and effectiveness of risperidone in this age group.”

Dr. Biederman was the lead author of a trial published last year concluding that treatment with risperidone improved symptoms of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder in bipolar children.”

Another of Biederman’s Harvard ignoble disciples was Jeff Bostic, who is also at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was named in a 2009 lawsuit joined by the US Department of Justice alleging Forest Laboratories promoted its antidepressants for pediatric use without FDA approval and paid kickbacks to docs to encourage prescriptions. He received $750,000 in payments for giving talks on using these drugs in children.

Strangely, the National Institute for Mental Health, which had awarded thse psychiatrists millions of dollars at taxpayers expense. It appears that NIMH officials did not see fit to even conduct an investigation into the corruption of science and violation of federal regulations. This demonstrates a lack of professional and moral integrity at the NIMH whose administrators think nothing about the misappropriation of public money for commercially-driven, junk research.

http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/828/9/

Backstory from Pharmalot:

Pharmalot

Harvard Docs Disciplined For Conflicts Of Interest

By Ed Silverman // July 2nd, 2011 // 9:03 am

Three years after they were fingered in a US Senate probe into the interplay between academics who receive grant money from both pharma and the National Institutes of Health, three prominent psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital have been sanctioned for violating conflict of interest rules and failing to report the extent of their payments.

In a mea culpa addressed to their colleagues, Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens wrote that “we want to offer our sincere apologies to HMS and MGH communities…We always believed we were complying in good faith with the institutional polices and our mistakes were honest ones. We now recognize that we should have devoted more time and attention to the detailed requirements of these policies and to their underlying objectives.”

And what is their punishment? They must refrain from “all industry-sponsored outside activities” for one year; for two years after the ban ends, they must obtain permission from the med school and the hospital before engaging in any of these activities and they must report back afterward; they must undergo certain training and they face delays before being considered for promotion or advancement (you can read their letter here).

The hospital had this to say: “A committee at Massachusetts General Hospital that has been looking into conflict-of-interest questions involving three MGH child psychiatrists has completed its review. Appropriate remedial actions have been taken by the hospital to address specific issues (read the statement). And a Harvard Med School spokesman sent us this: “We confirm that the review of their compliance with the Harvard Medical School Policy on Conflicts of Interest and Commitment has concluded, and appropriate actions have been taken.” He added that the conflicts policy was revised last year.

The sanctions result from a long-standing controversy over the explosive use of antipsychotics in children. Biederman, in particular (see photo), had been one of the most influential researchers in child psychiatry. Although his studies were small and often financed by drugmakers, his work helped fuel a 40-fold increase from 1994 to 2003 in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder.

For more than a decade, Biederman and his colleagues aggressively promoted the diagnosis and use of antipsychotics to treat childhood bipolar disorder, a problem that once was largely believed to be confined to adults. But the docs maintained this was underdiagnosed in kids and the meds could be used for treatment, even though they had not been approved for most pediatric use at the time. Meanwhile, the relationships with drugmakers were never properly disclosed (back story).

And for years, payments they received from drugmakers were not thoroughly reported to university officials. Yet, millions of dollars in NIH grants, which were administered by the hospital, were awarded to the docs at the same time they were receiving money from various drugmakers that make and sell antipsychotics and antidepressants. Which ones? Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

At one point, Biederman pushed J&J to fund a research center at MassGen that would focus on the use of its Risperdal antipsychotic in children, well before the med was approved for pediatric use. He was then placed in charge of the institute and began a study of 40 children between 4 and 6 years old who were given Risperdal and Lilly’s Zyprexa, another antipsychotic. At the time, Harvard and MGH rules forbid researchers from running trials with drugmakers if they receive more than $10,000 from a company that makes the drug (back story).

But in June 2008, US Senator Chuck Grassley made a far-reaching statement before Congress that pulled the curtain back on the money involved. The statement is memorialized in the Congressional Record. Referring to the three docs, he said “they are some of the top psychiatrists in the country, and their research is some of the most important in the field. They have also taken millions of dollars from the drug companies.”

“Out of concern about the relationship between this money and their research, I asked Harvard and Mass General Hospital last October to send me the conflict of interest forms that these doctors had submitted to their institutions. Universities often require faculty to fill these forms out so that we can know if the doctors have a conflict of interest. The forms I received were from the year 2000 to the present. Basically, these forms were a mess. My staff had a hard time figuring out which companies the doctors were consulting for and how much money they were making.”

How much were they making? At first, maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars combined. But at his behest, the med school and hospital asked the docs to take a second look. “And this is when things got interesting. Dr. Biederman suddenly admitted to over $1.6 million dollars from the drug companies. And Dr. Spencer also admitted to over $1 million. Meanwhile, Dr. Wilens also reported over $1.6 million in payments from the drug companies.

“The question you might ask is: Why weren’t Harvard and Mass General watching over these doctors? The answer is simple: They trusted these physicians to honestly report this money.” And as Grassley then noted, there was still more money that went unreported (to read the Congressional record, click here and then check the box for 2008 and type in the name ‘Biederman’ in the search box. Then click on ‘payments to physicians’ to read the complete statement and the chart showing payments to each doc).

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According to Psycho/Pharma—1 In 66 Americans Is A Psycho

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

Business Insider – July 20, 2011

by Robert Johnson

Image: wikipedia commons

Outselling even common drugs to treat high blood pressure and acid reflux, antipsychotic medications are the single top-selling prescription drug in the United States.

Once reserved for hard-core, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest type of mental illnesses to treat hallucinations, delusions or major thought disorders; today, the drugs are handed out to unruly kids and absent minded elderly.

A recent story in Al Jazeera by James Ridgeway of Mother Jones illuminates the efforts by major pharmaceutical companies to get doctors prescribing medicines like Zyprexa, Seroquel, and Abilify to patients for whom the drugs were never intended.

Focusing on psychiatrists because they rely on subjective diagnoses, the drug reps have been so successful that they’ve changed the criteria for mental illness and disability payments. Ridgeway quotes former New England Journal of Medicine editor Marcia Angell.

“[T]he tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 – from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling – a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children.” Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are “simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one.” Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, “Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people.”

Particularly vulnerable because medication decisions are often out of their hands the old and the young suffer most.

For kids: the number diagnosed with bi-polar disorder rose 40-fold between 1994 and 2003 and one in five comes away from a psychiatrist with a prescription for an antipsychotic.

Dosing the elderly at nursing homes has become so common that sales reps have coined the term “five at five” — meaning 5 milligrams of Zyprexa at 5 pm to sedate difficult residents.

For all their nefarious wrangling, in 2009, Lily agreed to pay $1.4 billion, including a $515 million criminal fine. The largest ever in a health care case and the largest criminal fine on any corporation in the U.S.

That year, Lilly sold $1.8 billion of Zyprexa alone.

http://www.businessinsider.com/zyprexa-antipsycotics-top-selling-drugs-in-us-2011-7

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The Voices Inside Their Heads – Gail Hornstein’s Approach To Understanding Madness

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011
Note from CCHR:  This is a very interesting article, and reminds us of the movie A Beautiful Mind and the great disservice it did to Nobel prize winner John Nash, by completely altering the most remarkable element that led to his recovery— the fact he refused to continue taking psychiatric drugs, thereby changing the entire success of what Nash was able to accomplish—a drug free recovery. The film portrays Nash as taking “newer medications” at the time of winning his Nobel Prize, (which was false) thereby directly implying it was psychiatric drugs that cured him.  Nash, himself, says this is pure fiction; he hadn’t take psychiatric drugs for 24 years and stated that he willed his own recovery.   Why invent a fictitious pharma-friendly ending when the truth was so much more inspiring? The fact that the screenwriter’s mother was a psychiatrist may have had something to do with the film’s distortion, Nash said. The point is that psychiatry has long refused to admit psychiatric disorders are not medical conditions, and have vehemently suppressed workable non-drug treatments to overcome mental difficulties, even of the severity experienced by John Nash.  In the 1970′s, psychiatrist Loren Mosher, Chief of Schizophrenic Research for the National Institute of Mental Health, (who openly stated the diagnoses of schizophrenia had no medical merit), established a drug-free program — Soteria House — for patients diagnosed schizophrenic, “The idea was that schizophrenia can often be overcome with the help of meaningful relationships, rather than with drugs, and such treatment would eventually lead to unquestionable healthier lives,” Mosher said. Between 85 percent and 90 percent of the acute and long-term clients were able to return to the community without use of conventional hospital treatment.

But like “A Beautiful Mind,” this amazing accomplishment was buried and discredited. According to Mosher, “By 1980, I was removed from my post altogether. All of this occurred because of my strong stand against the overuse of medication and disregard for drug-free, psychological interventions to treat psychological disorders.”

There is no doubt that people suffer from a wide range of emotional, behavioral and mental difficulties.  But psychiatric diagnoses (disorders) are not medical conditions, evidenced by the fact there is not one proven medical test for any psychiatric disorder, including “schizophrenia.”  Falsely “medicalizing”  these problems benefits only two groups—the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatric industry—not those seeking real help.  For more information: http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-disorders/

The Sun – July 19, 2011
by Tracy Frisch

The complete text of this selection is available in our print edition.

TRACY FRISCH lives in Washington County, New York, where she is a freelance journalist, homesteader, and grassroots organizer leading a “zero-waste” campaign. She derives much of her bodily and spiritual sustenance from her almost-year-round vegetable garden.

As a teenager Gail Hornstein developed a fascination with first-person accounts of mental illness, and in the decades since, she has collected more than seven hundred patient memoirs, autobiographies, and witness testimonies. She likens them to survivor accounts or slave narratives, with patients struggling against the psychiatric system to make their voices heard.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately one in four Americans suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder. Our society has gone further than any other in classifying unwanted behaviors and emotions as diseases demanding medical — and often pharmaceutical — treatment.

Hornstein, now a Mount Holyoke College professor of psychology, questions whether this labeling benefits those being labeled. She also rejects the idea that psychiatric patients, however severe their symptoms, have a physical disease. Even schizophrenia and other types of psychosis, Hornstein suggests, can result from trauma, abuse, and oppression. She offers a popular course for psychology majors in which they read only books by patients, and she urges a more open-minded inquiry into what causes mental illness and how people get better.

Frisch: You express enormous empathy for those labeled “mentally ill,” yet you avoid romanticizing their lives. How do you walk this fine line?

Hornstein: I try to understand people as they understand themselves. If you ask them what their experience is or read their own accounts, you’ll find they can be articulate and psychologically sophisticated. Even people who lack formal education can offer highly nuanced descriptions of their emotional lives. I’ve adopted a phrase from my uk colleagues: “experts of their own experience.” This view helps me avoid either romanticizing their experience — seeing it in a more positive way than they do — or seeing it only as a tragedy with no redemptive qualities.

Emotional distress is highly individualized, and we shouldn’t come to any general conclusions about it. There are people who feel they’ve learned something profound from the experience of hearing voices, but there are plenty of others who are frightened and just want the voices to go away. One woman said to me, “If I could wake up tomorrow and not hear any voices, I would open up a bottle of champagne.” Yet she’d discovered the strength to get through it.

Frisch: Why do you feel so strongly about avoiding the phrase “mental illness”?

Hornstein: The term “mental illness” is heavily charged, politicized, and ambiguous. I prefer to talk about “anomalous experiences,” “extreme emotions,” and “emotional distress.” The main reason I don’t use medical language is that people who are suffering often don’t find it very helpful. No one experiences “schizophrenia” — that’s just a technical name for a lot of complicated feelings.

People who have been taught that “mental illnesses are brain diseases” see psychiatric patients as dangerous and unlikely to recover. And those in crisis are often understandably reluctant to consult mental-health professionals, because the stigma of mental illness is so severe: it’s possible to lose your job, your home, and your family as a consequence of being diagnosed with a mental illness. In cultures that take a social view of emotional distress, by contrast, people more readily seek help because they aren’t as likely to be ostracized and are assumed to be capable of full recovery.

The World Health Organization did an international study comparing outcomes for patients diagnosed with schizophrenia in “developed” countries — including the U.S., the United Kingdom, Denmark, and others — and in “developing” countries such as Colombia, Nigeria, and India. To their astonishment, they found that outcomes were much better in the developing countries. As often happens when a study produces unexpected results, the findings weren’t believed at first. So the study was repeated a few years later with a more stringent definition of what constituted improvement for the patients. The results were the same.

Two hypotheses have been put forward to explain these findings. One is that developing countries don’t use medications over the long term because they can’t afford it. Without long-term medication, patients don’t become chronically disabled. The other hypothesis is that people in developing countries are more likely to be cared for at home and be a part of their community, rather than being isolated or sent away to a hospital, and this helps them recover.

Frisch: How does what is commonly called “mental illness” differ from physical disease?

Hornstein: In psychiatry mental illness is a metaphor imposed on people’s behavior. There aren’t any physical methods of diagnosing a mental illness: There’s no blood test. There’s no mri. So-called mental illnesses are diagnosed on the basis of behavior. The “chemical-imbalance” theory was invented by the marketing departments of drug companies to try to convince doctors to prescribe their products. Some doctors say depression is just like diabetes: you have an imbalance of a neurotransmitter, the way a diabetic might need more or less insulin, and this drug will restore your balance. But with diabetes it’s possible to measure the amount of sugar and insulin in your blood. We know what a balanced level is. No doctor who has given anyone an antidepressant has ever measured the level of a neurotransmitter in the patient’s body. There is no independent means by which to tell if someone has a “chemical imbalance.”

Frisch: Do any mental illnesses have a known physiological basis?

Hornstein: The initial symptoms of Huntington’s disease resemble the symptoms of mental illness. When folk singer Woody Guthrie first manifested Huntington’s disease, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital. Similarly people in the early stages of brain cancer may behave in anomalous ways. If you don’t know they have cancer, you might think they’re having a psychiatric breakdown. But once they get a cat scan, you can see the brain tumor. You can’t see schizophrenia.

Frisch: I have always taken it for granted that only mystics or crazy people hear voices, but you suggest that it’s more common than we think.

Hornstein: Many people who hear voices never attract the attention of the psychiatric system. Estimates are that 4 percent of the uk population hears voices — approximately the same percent that has asthma. In Western society we most often associate hearing voices with illness. If we lived in a part of the world that was given to greater religiosity, unusual psychological experiences might be labeled as divine gifts. All the major religions of the world include figures who heard voices or had other anomalous psychological experiences. If the pastor in an Evangelical Christian church tells the congregation, “God spoke to me last night,” no one in that church thinks he has lost his mind.

Whether a phenomenon is considered “abnormal” or not depends on the circumstances, the person’s suffering, the reactions of others, and many more factors. One of the main goals of my book Agnes’s Jacket is to give readers the opportunity to learn about people who have unusual experiences and to encourage them to tolerate a wider range of behavior in themselves and others.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/427/the_voices_inside_their_heads

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Antidepressant Nation

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

Truthdig – July 14, 2011

10 percent of Americans over age six now take antidepressants

A serious conversation is under way in the United States on the subject of psychiatric drugs. The debate consists of three fundamental issues: first, whether antidepressants actually treat depression; second, the vast, growing body of evidence that psychotropic medications alter the brain permanently; and third, the pharmaceutical industry’s continuing, decades-old corruption of American psychiatrists, many of whom have been made by drug companies’ shenanigans into little more than handsomely paid industry shills.

A careful questioning of these issues written by the spectacularly decorated Harvard Medical School lecturer Dr. Marcia Angell appeared as a two-part essay published earlier this summer in The New York Review of Books. In addition to holding a medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine and undergraduate diplomas in both chemistry and mathematics, Angell is a Fulbright Scholar, a board-certified pathologist, author of two books, a member of numerous professional health care associations and a retired 20-year staffer at the New England Journal of Medicine, which she ultimately left as editor-in-chief.

The recent publication of three books, each of which takes up one of the issues raised above, provided the occasion for Angell’s essay. In it, she argues convincingly that antidepressants are not known to do what drug companies and many psychiatrists say they do. It is this claim that drew the attention of practicing psychiatrist and Brown University professor Dr. Peter D. Kramer, who in a New York Times commentary published last Sunday questioned some but not all of what Dr. Angell wrote.

Both articles deserve to be read, but there is a crucial difference between them. While Kramer points to much data that must be taken seriously, his wandering defense of the utility of antidepressants does not undo the diligent, methodical inquiry one would expect from someone with Angell’s credentials—and which she delivers. Otherwise, he too is a critic of Big Pharma’s shady dealings. Kramer nods with genuine concern toward the dangers associated with the prolonged use of psychotropics and, in his conclusion, expresses support for treatment via effective alternatives. Both professionals agree that serious research needs to be done to understand exactly what these drugs are doing. —ARK

Marcia Angell in The New York Review of Books:

Nowadays treatment by medical doctors nearly always means psychoactive drugs, that is, drugs that affect the mental state. In fact, most psychiatrists treat only with drugs, and refer patients to psychologists or social workers if they believe psychotherapy is also warranted. The shift from “talk therapy” to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment coincides with the emergence over the past four decades of the theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs. That theory became broadly accepted, by the media and the public as well as by the medical profession, after Prozac came to market in 1987 and was intensively promoted as a corrective for a deficiency of serotonin in the brain. The number of people treated for depression tripled in the following ten years, and about 10 percent of Americans over age six now take antidepressants. The increased use of drugs to treat psychosis is even more dramatic. The new generation of antipsychotics, such as Risperdal, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, has replaced cholesterol-lowering agents as the top-selling class of drugs in the US.

Read Part 1: The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?

Read Part 2: The Illusions of Psychiatry

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Harvard Medical School Professor Among Five Psychiatrists Accused of Ghostwriting

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

The Harvard Crimson – July 12, 2011

—Staff writer Naveen N. Srivatsa

Photo: Keri D Mabry

A complaint filed with the federal Office of Research Integrity alleged that a group of psychiatrists, including an associate professor at the Harvard Medical School, signed their names to an academic paper written by a communications firm hired by a major pharmaceutical company.

Gary Sachs, a researcher affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital, is one of five doctors identified in the formal accusation filed July 8 by University of Pennsylvania professor Jay D. Amsterdam.

The psychiatrists allowed the medical communications company Scientific Therapeutics Information, hired by SmithKline Beecham, to draft a paper using their names, according to the complaint. The paper, according to Amsterdam, suggested that the antidepressant Paxil can help treat some cases of bipolar disorder.

SmithKline Beecham, which has since merged into the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, manufactured Paxil.

The practice known as ghostwriting is widely condemned by scientific journals. The World Association of Medical Editors calls ghostwriting “dishonest and unacceptable.”

The complaint includes messages sent between those affiliated with the study, as well as their supervisors. The attached messages include professors saying that Scientific Therapeutics Information and SmithKline Beecham selected the first author of the paper and failed to provide the paper to all investigators before submission.

But the messages also seem to portray a feud between Amsterdam and University of Pennsylvania Associate Professor Laszlo Gyulai, one of the accused researchers. In one message, Amsterdam accuses him of stealing his research.

“As per your investigation there is little doubt that these data were misappropriated from me and used and published without my knowledge and without regard to the significant contribution that I made to this study,” Amsterdam wrote in an email to Gyulai’s supervisor.

The paper was published in June 2001, and the research was funded by grants from GlaxoSmithKline and the National Institute of Mental Health.

In an interview Wednesday morning, Sachs, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, said that while the relationship between Amsterdam and Gyulai was antagonistic, the accusations of research misconduct should be investigated.

“There might be unhappiness between two faculty memebers, and they might escalate this. But the question is whether there is any basis to this assertion, and this is a very serious assertion,” he said. “So apart from whatever motivations there may be, they did raise assertions, and those assertions deserve to be investigated.”

Sachs said that he was involved in designing the study and that he saw the paper before it was submitted to the journal.

While he said he did not interact with anyone from Scientific Therapeutics International, he did come in contact with employees of the pharamceutical company.

“The idea that bipolar depression was important to study has been an essential part of my career. Encouraging studies in this field is obviously, as an academic, something I’d want to do,” he said. “I was very pleased that they were willing to put their drug to the test. I give them credit of actually having the trial for the drug. Interacting with them in the course of the design and execution of the study, that’d all be standard stuff to do.”

In a statement, GlaxoSmithKline said that employees were involved in the draft’s development and that the company financially supported the study. It said that the primary authors of a paper have final approval of the draft and that when its employees provide “substantive assistance” to a paper, it is disclosed.

“This article was written more than 10 years ago and we do not have details about the development of the manuscript,” a spokesperson said in the statement. “GSK is committed to complete transparency regarding clinical and case studies.”

A spokesperson for the hospital said that it is looking into the complaint.

“Massachusetts General Hospital takes allegations of research misconduct very seriously and will handle the matter in compliance with our policy to determine if there’s any validity to the complaint,” spokesperson Kristen Stanton said in an email.

Sachs said that since the filing of the complaint, he has discussed the matter with a hospital representative.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/7/12/complaint-amsterdam-sachs-glaxosmithkline/

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Mass psychosis in the US—How Big Pharma got Americans hooked on anti-psychotic drugs

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

ALJAZEERA – July 12, 2011

by James Ridgeway

Drug companies like Pfizer are accused of pressuring doctors into over-prescribing medications to patients in order to increase profits - GALLO/GETTY

Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses – primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry’s development of a new class of medications known as “atypical antipsychotics.” Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs – in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems.

The atypical anti-psychotics were the bright new stars in the pharmaceutical industry’s roster of psychotropic drugs – costly, patented medications that made people feel and behave better without any shaking or drooling. Sales grew steadily, until by 2009 Seroquel and Abilify numbered fifth and sixth in annual drug sales, and prescriptions written for the top three atypical antipsychotics totaled more than 20 million.  Suddenly, antipsychotics weren’t just for psychotics any more.

Not just for psychotics anymore

By now, just about everyone knows how the drug industry works to influence the minds of American doctors, plying them with gifts, junkets, ego-tripping awards, and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. “Psychiatrists are particularly targeted by Big Pharma because psychiatric diagnoses are very subjective,” says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, whose PharmedOut project tracks the industry’s influence on American medicine, and who last month hosted a conference on the subject at Georgetown. A shrink can’t give you a blood test or an MRI to figure out precisely what’s wrong with you. So it’s often a case of diagnosis by prescription. (If you feel better after you take an anti-depressant, it’s assumed that you were depressed.) As the researchers in one study of the drug industry’s influence put it, “the lack of biological tests for mental disorders renders psychiatry especially vulnerable to industry influence.” For this reason, they argue, it’s particularly important that the guidelines for diagnosing and treating mental illness be compiled “on the basis of an objective review of the scientific evidence” – and not on whether the doctors writing them got a big grant from Merck or own stock in AstraZeneca.

Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a leading critic of the Big Pharma, puts it more bluntly: “Psychiatrists are in the pocket of industry.” Angell has pointed out that most of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of mental health clinicians, have ties to the drug industry. Likewise, a 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 of the shrinks who wrote the American Psychiatric Association’s most recent clinical guidelines for treating depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies.

In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Angell deconstructs what she calls an apparent “raging epidemic of mental illness” among Americans. The use of psychoactive drugs—including both antidepressants and antipsychotics—has exploded, and if the new drugs are so effective, Angell points out, we should “expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising.” Instead, “the tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 – from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling – a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children.” Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are “simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one.” Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, “Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people.”

Cost benefit analysis

What’s especially troubling about the over-prescription of the new antipsychotics is its prevalence among the very young and the very old – vulnerable groups who often do not make their own choices when it comes to what medications they take. Investigations into antipsychotic use suggests that their purpose, in these cases, may be to subdue and tranquilize rather than to treat any genuine psychosis.

Carl Elliott reports in Mother Jones magazine: “Once bipolar disorder could be treated with atypicals, rates of diagnoses rose dramatically, especially in children. According to a recent Columbia University study, the number of children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder rose 40-fold between 1994 and 2003.” And according to another study, “one in five children who visited a psychiatrist came away with a prescription for an antipsychotic drug.”

A remarkable series published in the Palm Beach Post in May true revealed that the state of  Florida’s juvenile justice department has literally been pouring these drugs into juvenile facilities, “routinely” doling them out “for reasons that never were approved by federal regulators.” The numbers are staggering: “In 2007, for example, the Department of Juvenile Justice bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen. Overall, in 24 months, the department bought 326,081 tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for use in state-operated jails and homes for children…That’s enough to hand out 446 pills a day, seven days a week, for two years in a row, to kids in jails and programs that can hold no more than 2,300 boys and girls on a given day.” Further, the paper discovered that “One in three of the psychiatrists who have contracted with the state Department of Juvenile Justice in the past five years has taken speaker fees or gifts from companies that make antipsychotic medications.”

In addition to expanding the diagnoses of serious mental illness, drug companies have encouraged doctors to prescribe atypical anti-psychotics for a host of off-label uses. In one particularly notorious episode, the drugmaker Eli Lilly pushed Zyprexa on the caregivers of old people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, as well as agitation, anxiety, and insomnia. In selling to nursing home doctors, sales reps reportedly used the slogan “five at five”—meaning that five milligrams of Zyprexa at 5 pm would sedate their more difficult charges. The practice persisted even after FDA had warned Lilly that the drug was not approved for such uses, and that it could lead to obesity and even diabetes in elderly patients.

In a video interview conducted in 2006, Sharham Ahari, who sold Zyprexa for two years at the beginning of the decade, described to me how the sales people would wangle the doctors into prescribing it. At the time, he recalled, his doctor clients were giving him a lot of grief over patients who were “flipping out” over the weight gain associated with the drug, along with the diabetes. “We were instructed to downplay side effects and focus on the efficacy of drug…to recommend the patient drink a glass a water before taking a pill before the  meal and then after the meal in hopes the stomach would expand” and provide an easy way out of this obstacle to increased sales. When docs complained, he recalled, “I told them, ‘Our drug is state of the art. What’s more important? You want them to get better or do you want them to stay the same–a thin psychotic patient or a fat stable patient.’”

For the drug companies, Shahrman says, the decision to continue pushing the drug despite side effects is matter of cost benefit analysis: Whether you will make more money by continuing to market the drug for off-label use, and perhaps defending against lawsuits, than you would otherwise. In the case of Zyprexa, in January 2009, Lilly settled a lawsuit brought by with the US Justice Department, agreeing to pay $1.4 billion, including “a criminal fine of $515 million, the largest ever in a health care case, and the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal prosecution of any kind,”the Department of Justice said in announcing the settlement.” But Lilly’s sale of Zyprexa in that year alone were over $1.8 billion.

Turning people into zombies

As it turns out, the atypical antipsychotics may not even be the best choice for people with genuine, undisputed psychosis.

Read the rest of the article here: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/20117313948379987.html

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The problem with the DSM

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

The Commons – June 29, 2011

Do you have a shopping addiction disorder? Perhaps an addiction to food? Maybe one of your kids has Internet addiction disorder, or video-game attachment syndrome.

Well, not quite yet, because these kinds of new mental diagnoses are only proposed, not final, for the new revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

And there is a terrible problem with this.

The DSM was first created in the 1920s. Based on psychoanalytic theory, it enumerated fewer than 100 mental problems that a psychiatrist could diagnose, all of them attributable to environmental conditions, generally the role of parenting.

We know now that this theoretical stance was limited and, in many cases, wrong. In 1980, the second revision of the DSM took place. Freud was discarded, and the revised bible now included several hundred disorders, all delineated by a list of observable symptoms and a framework for limiting and differentiating diagnoses.

Three versions later, the current DSM lists more than 1,000 disorders. No theories are espoused for their origins, though implicit in it is that there is a mix of genetic and environmental causes that shape neurological development.

During this period of about three decades, the incidence of attention disorders in the general population has increased from 2 percent to 10 percent.

In the 1980s, people diagnosed with bipolar disorder represented less than 1 percent of the population; now the number has increased to 5 percent.

New diagnoses, like oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder, now cover as many as 5 percent of children.

Autism, which afflicted a tiny percentage of the population in the 1990s, now accounts for 1 out of every 100 children.

What is wrong with this picture? Do we have an epidemic on our hands? Something in the water we drink, or the air we breathe?

The standard APA explanation is that we now recognize and treat disorders that in the past were overlooked, often judged in moral terms, and left untreated.

In this view, a reasonable estimate of the current percentage of adults with undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder would be about 1 out of 20, since we were born too early for the new diagnostic scheme. Maybe you. Certainly me.

There is another way to tell the story, however.

In this story, one could argue that each change in the DSM has essentially recruited a new batch of subjects for identification and treatment.

Instead of seeing difference as a natural outcome of personal characteristics, all of which have their place in the wonderful diversity of humankind, we have come to see individuals as made up of symptoms.

In this view, these symptoms are all treatable, usually by medication, within an implicit vision of normality arising from a dominant culture that is mainly driven by economic considerations.

And that’s the problem. The psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries essentially depend on a tautological logic, a kind of nightmarish Field of Dreams approach in which, if you define it, they will come and take their meds.

But it is not the only problem. The reality is that there are real mental disorders that carry a terrible cost, and that many of these can be treated effectively through a combination of medication, psychotherapy, and environmental support.

That our current approach mixes apples and oranges, the relatively small population that is truly in need of medical help with the much larger group that does not, risks discrediting the field in general, in ways that might ultimately mean that individuals who truly require medical intervention might choose not to get it.

It also adds costs to our yearly health-care budget which are largely unnecessary, though I have yet to hear this discussed in the Sturm und Drang that has attended President Obama’s attempt to make sense out of our broken health-care system.

Perhaps the greatest problem is that children who, in another age, were simply different — odd, quirky, restless, bored, sad, angry — are now disordered, and often drugged to make them more “normal.”

Adults, too. Between 2006 and 2010, the number of prescriptions for antidepressants increased by 43 percent. More than 23 million prescriptions were filled last year.

All of this while the world we have shaped seems to be spinning rapidly out of control, whether in the loss of contact with nature caused by urbanization and suburbanization, the terrible dislocations of a post-industrial society in which 1 percent of the population controls almost all the wealth, or in the simple reality that the climate we live in will change over the next decades in ways that will take a horrific human toll.

Who wouldn’t feel sad, or angry?

* * *

The new DSM is coming, probably in 2013 or 2014 — a lot later than its original projected deadline of 2011, in part because debates over what it should include have been so fierce.

One of the main external critiques of the process is that so many of the shrinks working on the bible are affiliated with pharmaceutical companies. It’s an important point, one that the public has barely seen in the popular press.

To my mind, the more important critique is that the fundamental underpinnings of the DSM are flawed, and that the lack of a theoretical basis means that any quirk or problem a person might express can be categorized as illness. Even expert tautological logic is still tautological.

There are reasons why people shop when they are sad, or why children stay up all night playing video games. There are reasons that a lot of preadolescent boys find it hard to sit still in class and cause problems for their teachers. There are reasons why children with overstressed parents, children who spend a lot of time living in an internal world of television, music, Facebook, instant messaging, and texting, have difficulty developing the skill of social interaction. There are reasons why children get sad, or angry, in the world they live in.

You won’t find these in the DSM.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.commonsnews.org/site/site04/story.php?articleno=3712&page=3

For more information see this video featuring CCHR Co-founder, Dr. Thomas Szasz

http://www.cchrint.org/videos/experts/thomas-szasz/

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Psychiatrists with corrupt pasts found working in juvenile justice facilities and doping children

Saturday, June 25th, 2011

NaturalNews- June 27, 2011

by Monica G Young

Investigations found doctors labeling & drugging kids had taken huge speaker fees or gifts from drug companies that make antipsychotics.

An investigation into the massive drugging of kids in Florida juvenile jails has uncovered psychiatric doctors with deplorable records working for the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ). Their histories include not only grand theft and medical malpractice, but overmedicating patients to the point of death.

In a series of outstanding articles in the Palm Beach Post, reporter Michael Laforgia lays out the heinous trail of a still unfolding investigation. It began with an expose that children in state custody were receiving heavy dosages of powerful antipsychotics; in two years, Florida bought hundreds of thousands of these tablets with no DJJ tracking system in place to detect practitioner abuse. This led to a finding that doctors giving the diagnoses had taken huge speaker fees or gifts from drug companies that make antipsychotics.

The Post’s newest article reveals psychiatrists working in the juvenile justice system whose records should have barred them. “Some psychiatrists took DJJ jobs after they were cited for breaking the law, making grave medical missteps or violating state rules,” writes Laforgia. “Others were hired after they were accused of overmedicating patients, sometimes fatally. All were empowered to prescribe drugs to jailed kids as powerful antipsychotic pills flowed freely into Florida’s homes for wayward children.”

The full details should be seen at (http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/s…)

To summarize examples cited:

Dr. Gold Smith Dorval pleaded no contest in 2004 to a grand theft charge after a probe found he billed Medicaid for more than $350,000 in fraudulent claims – under the pretense of providing therapy to juvenile delinquents and foster children. No one screened Dorval’s background in 2007 before a state-contracted agency, Compass Health Systems, sent him to work at a juvenile detention center that year. He states he was “not aware of any wrongdoing” in accepting the job.

Dr. Charles D. Jack prescribed such powerful cocktails of antidepressants and painkillers to a patient over a two and a half year period that she died in 2002, at age 42. Facing charges, Dack denied wrongdoing but agreed to pay a $7000 fine and take a course on misprescribing. None of this prevented him from working until April of this year at three privately-run juvenile treatment  facilities used by the DJJ.

Dr. Samuel McClure diagnosed an 11-year-old with ADD and although the boy was quite small for his age, he gave him high concentrations of antidepressants which had never been approved for children. The mother woke one morning to find her son dead on the floor. Despite being sued in 2004 for medical malpractice – a case settled for $500,000 – McClure worked in juvenile treatment homes from January 2006 until June 2009.

Dr. Sohail Punjwani, another psychiatrist, conducted a drug trial on seven children in 2006, six of whom overdosed. One slashed her wrists while hallucinating, per a later FDA warning letter to Punjwani. He went on to work at a juvenile detention center and then for the foster care system. In 2009 he prescribed a very potent combo of psychoactive drugs to a 7-year old who subsequently locked himself in the bathroom of his foster home and hanged himself. Punjwani blames his medication errors with the boy on the nurse.

Per the Palm Beach Post, records show “roughly one in eight of the psychiatrists who have worked for DJJ in the past five years has settled a malpractice lawsuit in Florida.”

Florida’s DJJ Secretary now has a probe underway into this matter and the abuse of antipsychotics by the department. No long term studies have ever proven these drugs safe for kids. But plenty of evidence shows they can create heavy weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, involuntary facial and body movements, suicidal thoughts and a life of drug dependency.

Prominent California psychiatrist under trial for molesting boys in juvenile justice system

Another example of exploiting the most vulnerable is the once highly regarded child psychiatrist, Dr. William Ayres.

Ayres is undergoing legal proceedings in San Mateo California for accusations of molesting boys in state care, under the guise of giving medical exams. Prosecutors say he knew these youths would hesitate to come forward and probably wouldn’t be believed if they did.

During his forty years in practice, Ayres saw hundreds of adolescents referred by the juvenile justice system, court-appointed attorneys and social workers. Several of these victims have testified against him.

Ayres was a former president of the American Academy of Adolescent and Child Psychiatry, the leading professional medical association for child psychiatrists. In 2002 he was honored with a lifetime achievement award for “his tireless effort to improve the lives of children and adolescents.”

Now 79, Ayres says he has no memory of the victims who have accused him.

State Mental Hospital Director sentenced to 248 years in prison for molesting foster kids

Yet another high profile figure in the mental health world – Claude Edward Foulk – was sentenced in February 2011 to 248 years in prison for molesting foster sons and other boys over a period of four decades. Reportedly, he would threaten to return them to foster care if they didn’t comply. But some of those victims, now grown men, went to the police.

Prior to his arrest in 2010, Foulk was the executive director of the Napa State Hospital, California’s largest mental health facility which includes sex offenders in its patient population. Faulk was selected to run the hospital by the Director of the Department of Mental Health in California.

“Hey, I didn’t do anything wrong”

What’s disturbing is the diabolical lack of accountability reflected in these psychiatrists’ statements and actions. Denying accusations, shifting blame, justifying atrocities. Equally disturbing is how many government agencies, schools and parents blindly place children in the hands of these pseudo-doctors. Yet they do not use blood tests, brain scans or any other medical tests in diagnosing mental disorders and putting millions of kids worldwide on powerful drugs.

The sordid history of psychiatry’s vigorous and deceptive campaign to medicalize itself and put it on stature with other MDs is covered in Robert Whitaker’s book released in 2010: “Anatomy of an Epidemic.”

Sources include:

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/s…

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/d…

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/s…

http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-04-…

http://www.sfexaminer.com/blogs/law…

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl…

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Dosed in juvie jail: Troubled doctors hired to treat kids in state custody

Monday, June 20th, 2011

By Michael LaForgia

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

By the time Florida started paying Dr. Gold Smith Dorval to counsel and medicate jailed children, the Pembroke Pines psychiatrist already had experience with kids in state custody.

He had used them, authorities said, to bilk the government out of money for the poor.

When Dorval pleaded no contest to a felony grand theft charge, it should have barred him, by law, from working for Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice.

It didn’t.

And, like Dorval, other doctors have emerged from past troubles and gotten jobs at DJJ – with authority to prescribe drugs to kids in state jails, a Palm Beach Post investigation has found.

Some psychiatrists took DJJ jobs after they were cited for breaking the law, making grave medical missteps or violating state rules. Others were hired after they were accused of overmedicating patients, sometimes fatally.

All were empowered to prescribe drugs to jailed kids as powerful antipsychotic pills flowed freely into Florida’s homes for wayward children.

“It’s appalling. A psychiatrist is a psychiatrist. They’re licensed, they’ve been to medical school, and there is a certain trust placed in that person’s judgment when they tell you that this child needs to be medicated,” said John Walsh, an attorney with the Palm Beach County Legal Aid Society who has represented children in juvenile court. “This just illustrates that we always have to be on guard with children.”

In two years, Florida bought hundreds of thousands of tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for children housed in state-run jails and programs. The meds were administered in a juvenile justice system that doesn’t track prescriptions and has no way of telling whether doctors are prescribing to make kids easier to control.

In some jails and homes, pills were prescribed by psychiatrists who took huge speaker fees from companies that make antipsychotic drugs, The Post found. In others, the task fell to doctors with troubled pasts.

In response to the newspaper’s first reports, published last month, DJJ Secretary Wansley Walters launched an investigation into the department’s use of antipsychotic drugs. DJJ officials declined to discuss The Post’s latest findings, citing the probe.

Spokesman C.J. Drake acknowledged, though, that the department has struggled to find psychiatrists willing to work in jails and programs. He also said DJJ sometimes has relied on companies that employ a stable of doctors, rather than signing a contract with a single physician.

As a result, Dorval went to work in a Broward County jail for children – even though he would have failed a state-mandated background check required by the contract.

Doctor’s bogus billings

In the late 1990s, Dorval claimed he was providing juvenile delinquents and other vulnerable children with needed therapy. Instead, state investigators said, he used bogus counselors to bill Medicaid for more than $350,000 in fraudulent claims.

He charged the government for offering more than 24 hours’ worth of children’s therapy in a single day, investigators said, and structured the scheme around kids who were homeless or in DJJ custody or foster care.

He tended to bill “for those children that the system ‘lost,’ ” according to an affidavit for his arrest.

Originally charged with four felonies in Broward, Dorval pleaded no contest to one count of grand theft in 2004.

Later, to keep his medical license, he agreed to pay $10,000 and was suspended, reprimanded and put on four years’ probation.

Although a judge withheld a formal finding of guilt, the plea disqualified Dorval from seeing patients in a juvenile jail. Even so, his employer, Miami-based Compass Health Systems, sent him to work at the Broward Juvenile Detention Center between August and December 2007.

No one screened his background beforehand.

In written responses to questions, Dorval said he was doing as he was told when Compass sent him to work in the Broward juvenile jail.

“At that period you cited, the psychiatrist that was seeing patients at the DJJ was out. Therefore I was designated by the management office to go and cover for that psychiatrist, until they switched me again to another place. I was not aware of any wrongdoing,” wrote Dorval, who stressed that he never signed a contract with DJJ. “I am only an employee. Wherever they send me to work I have to go.”

As for the criminal charges, he offered this explanation: “This case was a simple matter that became complicated, because my first lawyer messed me up.” After wrangling over the facts, “they decided to offer me a plea that would allow me to get a chance to fight for my license to practice medicine,” he wrote. “It was a real nightmare that generated in me a post-traumatic syndrome that I will never forget.”

DJJ officials declined to comment on Dorval’s hiring, again citing the investigation.

Compass officials didn’t respond to questions about Dorval.

DJJ had no contract with Compass as of May, records show.

Patient’s death missed in screening

In state-operated jails and programs, the rules say DJJ must screen doctors’ backgrounds and verify that physicians’ hold valid medical licenses. In privately run programs, which house the majority of children in the department’s custody, that responsibility falls to contracted companies.

Such screenings don’t catch everything: Doctors who kept their licenses after the state accused them of serious lapses have gone on to work in juvenile jails and homes.

Dr. Charles J. Dack is an example. For six years, Dack, a Lakeland-based physician who is board-certified in addiction and child psychiatry, prescribed a cocktail of antidepressants and powerful painkillers, including methadone and morphine, to a patient named Mary Tuxbury.

Eventually, Dack ramped up the doses of pills Tuxbury was taking, keeping her “at a toxic level of morphine for approximately two and a half years,” regulators from the state health department said. In March 2002, Tuxbury was found dead. She was 42.

An autopsy showed she died of “multiple drug intoxication, namely opiates and tricyclic antidepressants.”

Regulators charged Dack with failing to meet care standards and inappropriate prescribing. Dack settled the allegations in August 2007. He admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to pay a $7,000 fine and complete a course on “misprescribing” drugs.

A year later, he was hired to care for children at three privately run programs in Central Florida: Wilson Youth Academy, Peace River Youth Academy and New Beginnings Youth Academy. He worked in the homes until April.

Dack didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

Doctor hired after child’s death

Other DJJ doctors weren’t cited by regulators, but they were accused in court of fatal neglect. Roughly one in eight of the psychiatrists who have worked for DJJ in the past five years has settled a malpractice lawsuit in Florida, records show.

Among these was Dr. Samuel McClure. As a psychiatrist in Orlando, McClure diagnosed an 11-year-old boy named David Morganthal with attention deficit disorder. He prescribed powerful, mind-altering drugs for David – even though the child was much smaller than other kids his age, according to court documents.

One morning in November 2001, David’s mother woke to find her son dead on the floor of her double-wide mobile home. When they laid David out at the morgue, he measured less than 4-foot-2 and weighed 49 pounds.

Lab tests showed his blood contained an unusually high concentration of an antidepressant: about 60 percent more of the medication than doctors had expected.

The drug, mirtazapine, still hasn’t been approved as safe for children. David was taking the drug along with another antidepressant that hasn’t been approved for kids, citalopram.

The autopsy concluded the boy probably died from a seizure and heart problems caused by “reaction to prescription medication.”

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/state/dosed-in-juvie-jail-troubled-doctors-hired-to-1549240.html?viewAsSinglePage=true

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Drugging our Kids on Antidepressants

Monday, May 30th, 2011

The Daily Telegraph- May 30, 2011

by Elissa Doherty and Marianne Betts

AUSTRALIA – The  number of children aged six and under being prescribed anti-depressants has soared by almost 50 per cent since the federal government pledged to investigate the issue, new figures show.

Federal health department data reveals prescribing rates of the controversial drugs have risen from 852 in 2007-08 to 1264 in 2009-10.

But despite Health Minister Nicola Roxon ordering an investigation three years ago, a Freedom of Information request shows the government held just two meetings.

Five deaths have also been linked to anti-depressants in children aged 10 to 19 since 2009, Therapeutic Goods Administration figures show. In children aged nine and under, 89 adverse reactions were linked to anti-depressants over the same period.

The figures show Zoloft and Prozac were among the most prescribed in the youngest age group, as well as another used for chronic bed-wetting.

Anti-depressants

Australian Childhood Foundation chief executive Dr Joe Tucci said he would have expected the government to act by now.

“I cannot think of a good reason why any six-year-old, or younger, should be treated with antidepressants,” he said. “I think it’s gone up because medication is being used to treat the symptoms and not the cause.”

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists said it was alarming any anti-depressants were being prescribed for children and demanded answers.

“I would be very alarmed if these figures were true as there is no indication for an anti-depressant medication given to any child under the age of six,” Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Faculty chair Dr Phillip Brock said.

“I have written to the government before asking if figures in this age group are valid. The fact we are still seeing this kind of data demands an answer.”

Australian Medical Association vice-president Dr Steve Hambleton said doctors were concerned about prescribing medication for young people but were having more success with certain anti-depressants.

He had personally written scripts for two six-year-olds – and they had benefited.

A Health Department spokeswoman said: “The management of a patient’s medical condition, including the prescription of medicines, is a clinical decision between the clinician and patient or carer, taking regard of the patient’s circumstances.”

Black Dog Institute director Professor Gordon Parker said investigation was needed.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/drugging-our-kids-on-anti-depressants/story-e6freuy9-1226065161126

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