J&J drug protocols cost taxpayers millions—Lawsuit claims Investigator fired after going public on J&J’s anti-psychotic drug campaign

Allen Jones was curious.

Why did Pennsylvania use a computer program that often pointed to a Johnson & Johnson drug over other, cheaper medicine to treat certain mental illnesses, the investigator for the Keystone State’s Office of Inspector General wanted to know. While the computer program mandated doctors use a new line of anti-psychotic drugs, including Risperdal, sold by J&J’s subsidiary Janssen companies, Jones said he couldn’t find government-funded medical studies showing that these new drugs were any more effective than their generic predecessors.

Are Psychiatric Medications Making Us Sicker?

I first took a close look at treatments for mental illness 15 years ago while researching an article for Scientific American. At the time, sales of a new class of antidepressants, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI’s, were booming. The first SSRI, Prozac, had quickly become the most widely prescribed drug in the world. Many psychiatrists, notably Peter D. Kramer, author of the best seller Listening to Prozac, touted SSRI’s as a revolutionary advance in the treatment of mental illness. Prozac, Kramer said in a phrase that I hope now haunts him, could make patients “better than well.”

Clinical trials told a different story. SSRI’s are no more effective than two older classes of antidepressants, tricyclics and monoamine oxidase inhibitors. What was even more surprising to me—given the rave reviews Prozac had received from Kramer and others—was that antidepressants as a whole were not more effective than so-called talking cures, whether cognitive behavioral therapy or even old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalysis. According to some investigators, treatments for depression and other common ailments work—if they do work—by harnessing the placebo effect, the tendency of a patient’s expectation of improvement to become self-fulfilling. I titled my article “Why Freud Isn’t Dead.” Far from defending psychoanalysis, my point was that psychiatry has made disturbingly little progress since the heyday of Freudian theory.

Medicare fraud case nets dozens of arrests

“On Tuesday and Wednesday, federal agents fanned out across three South Florida counties, arresting a total of 42 Medicare fraud offenders. Three others charged are believed to be in Florida. The sweep came almost one year after the indictment of Miami-based American Therapeutic Corp., with seven regional clinics. A total of 24 defendants, including senior executives, psychiatrists and counselors, were charged, netting several guilty pleas and one trial conviction. That case alone accounted for $200 million in fraudulent Medicare claims during the past decade. The agency paid out $83 million.”