Tag Archives: antipsychotic

Prescription for prestige—Drug firms’ speaking fees flow to Harvard doctors; concerns about influence prompt new restrictions

Dr. Brent Forester, a geriatric psychiatrist at McLean, was one of the Massachusetts physicians paid the most last year, when he made $73,100 for giving nearly 40 talks for Eli Lilly to colleagues about the antipsychotic Zyprexa and the antidepressant Cymbalta over dinners in restaurants and in doctors offices. He has resigned from speakers bureaus to comply with the new rules, but said he “never felt like a spokesperson for the company at all.’’

Pfizer ends trial after widespread overdosing of children with psych drug

Drug giant Pfizer has canceled a scheduled clinical trial of its antipsychotic drug Geodon after the FDA accused it of subjecting child participants in a prior study to “widespread overdosing.”

$257 Million Lawsuit Award Against Antipsychotic Drug Maker: One of the largest in the history of the state & expected to set nationwide precedent

The award came late Thursday evening in a case involving the drug Risperdal, a popular antipsychotic administered for the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder manufactured by Janssen, a division of Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., which is part of Johnson & Johnson. The jury, which has been hearing the case for almost two months, found the firm misled Louisiana doctors about the possible side effects of the drug.

Johnson & Johnson to Pay $257 Million Over Antipsychotic Drug Marketing Tactics

Johnson & Johnson lost a $257.7 million jury verdict in Louisiana for making misleading claims about the safety of the company’s Risperdal antipsychotic drug.
J&J officials defrauded the state’s Medicaid system by wrongfully touting Risperdal as superior to competing antipsychotic drugs and minimizing its links to diabetes, said jurors in state court in Opelousas, Louisiana.

Confronting Bigots Intolerant of Alternative Mental Health Treatment

A long-term outcome study of schizophrenic patients who were treated with and without psychiatric drugs was published in 2007 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders. Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, research psychologist Martin Harrow, at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, discovered that after 4.5 years, 39 percent of the non-medicated group were “in recovery” and 60 percent had jobs. In contrast, during that same time period, the condition of the medicated patients worsened, with only six percent in recovery and few holding jobs. At the fifteen-year follow-up, among the non-drug group, only 28 percent suffered from any psychotic symptoms; in contrast, among the medicated group, 64 were actively psychotic.