A Chicago Tribune investigation recently showed how many frail and vulnerable Illinois nursing home residents have been unnecessarily dosed with anti-psychotics, leading to harm and an increased risk of death. One psychiatrist, the Tribune found in a joint investigation with ProPublica, provided assembly-line care to thousands of mentally ill patients.
The Texas Medication Algorithm (flow chart) Project (TMAP) was developed in 1995 in a collaborative effort between the pharmaceutical industry, prominent University of Texas psychiatrists…
The letter from Senator Grassley does not mention Fernando Mendez-Villamil by name, but it cites documents from the Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration about a prescriber who wrote 96,685 prescriptions for from the last quarter of 2007 through the first quarter of 2009 for Medicaid patients. Mendez-Villamil wrote nearly twice as many prescriptions for psychiatric drugs as the No. 2 Medicaid prescriber in the state.
The $1 billion “would be worse than many people are expecting,” said Navid Malik, an analyst at Matrix Corporate Capital in London. “Paxil’s been different from most drugs,” said Harris Pogust, a lawyer from Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, who is handling suicide and withdrawal cases. “You’ve had three major personal injury litigations over one drug — the suicide, the birth defect and the withdrawal cases. To have three significant problems with one drug is really unusual.”
Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs increased 50 percent with children in the US, and 73 percent among adults, from 1996 to 2006, according to a study in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Health Affairs. The CIA “World Factbook” estimate the world population to be about 6.8 billion and the US population to be a mere 307 million. In an April 2008 report, the market research firm Datamonitor reported that the “US dominates the ADHD market with a 94 percent market share.”