Drugmakers encouraged doctors to prescribe these drugs for children before the FDA sanctioned their use for youngsters. This was particularly troubling, given that the drugs can cause diabetes and weight gain, side effects that prompted thousands of lawsuits claiming that drugmakers tried to hide evidence of these problems.
Clearly the drug industry needs New Year’s Resolutions–and to honor them better than the Corporate Integrity Agreements with the government it keeps breaking. How about: “We will stop upgrading anxiety to depression, depression to bipolar disorder and bipolar disorder to ‘treatment resistant depression’ to sell drugs. We will admit that studies are beginning to show that the reason depression is sometimes treatment resistant is because it wasn’t depression to begin with but consumer advertising.”
Study patients took the anti-seizure drug Neurontin, and researchers measured tons of possible outcomes (like pain with touch, pain with cold, excessive pain with pinpricks, more than a dozen different scales for psychiatric symptoms, and so on). By random chance, if you measure enough outcomes, at least some of them will appear better after drug treatment. When the time came to report the findings, however, the researchers systematically omitted the outcomes on which the drug had no effect—and presented only the data showing benefit. That’s like dealing dozens of hands of poker to yourself but showing only the hand with good cards.
(Formerly National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association – NDMDA) The NDMDA was one of the major front groups established in 1986 that could lobby Congress for…
An ongoing U.S. Senate investigation headed by Senator Charles Grassly has sought disclosure of pharmaceutical funding paid to researchers, physicians, medical schools, medical journals and the patient advocacy community. 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.