The Australian commenter posing this question can look over here, at the States, to see what a national sedation policy might look like.

Not that every one of us has been zoned by Zeneca… mummified by Merck… Lalalanded by Lilly… but, you know, tens of millions of Americans have gotten there, and – out-of-it-wise – we’re way more advanced than the Aussies. Our best poets sing of it:

Let us go then, you and I,
Where America is spread out against the sky
Like a nation etherized upon a table…

In one particular way, Australia looked for awhile as though it might overtake us – i.e., in government-sponsored anti-psychotic dosing of children without psychotic symptoms.

To be sure, we’ve got Joseph Biederman (type his name into this blog’s search engine and enjoy).

But Australia’s got Patrick McGorry who, until he (under pressure from scientists around the world) abandoned the idea, thought it might be clever to experiment with giving fifteen-year-olds he determined to be “pre-psychotic” powerful antipsychotic drugs. Some people thought it wasn’t too cool to give “children who had not yet been diagnosed with a psychotic illness…. drugs with potentially dangerous side effects.” So last summer McGorry dropped the idea.

And now – under equally strong pressure from an outraged scientific community, McGorry has gone one step further.

Concerns about the overmedication of young people and rigid models of diagnosis have led the architect of early intervention in Australian psychiatry, Patrick McGorry, to abandon the idea pre-psychosis should be listed as a new psychiatric disorder.

The former Australian of the Year had previously accepted the inclusion of pre-psychosis – a concept he and colleagues developed – in the international diagnostic manual of mental disorders, or DSM, which is being updated this year.

Drug companies must be mildly dismayed. (Only mildly, because they’ll find a way around this.) Popular American news shows are pointing out that for most people anti-depressants are placebos with serious side effects. Critics are attacking the idea of a grief pill. And now the packed-with-potential idea of pre-psychosis (who ain’t pre-? and when will they figure out that an even niftier idea is clinically pre-neurotic?) is being savaged simply because some people think giving symptom-free people immensely powerful drugs is unethical!

Zoom in on the bigger picture here, if you will. Through incessant advertising, and through incentivized research professors at our universities, the drug industry is slowly rebuilding our basic human self-appraisals. We simply cannot get through life without pills.

… an “explosive” segment on anti-depressants as no better than placebos for the vast majority of people taking them? Will it be, as promised, explosive? Harvard’s Irving Kirsch will talk about his research, featured in The Emperor’s New Clothes: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth – another promised explosion. Marcia Angell’s review of his and other books on the subject in the New York Review of Books was also, I guess, explosive… But so far that essay prompted only a flaccid little response from Peter Kramer in the New York Times.

We’ve heard nothing from the companies that make billions of dollars off the sale of do-nothing, stuffed-with-side-effects drugs except for what they told Stahl: They work. Kramer said the same thing: “[I]t is dangerous for the press to hammer away at the theme that antidepressants are placebos. They’re not.”

Dangerous!

But why are Kramer and company doing little other than repeating, while speaking darkly of risk, that antidepressants work?

Et alors. I’m not sure major attention even of the sort 60 Minutes represents will constitute a bombshell. Positions here are and have long been entrenched, and you don’t exactly kiss goodbye a ten billion dollar enterprise without a struggle.

And millions of Americans – despite witnessing an extremely loud and incredibly close prescription pill epidemic – seem wedded to a sense of themselves as chemically dependent. Indeed to a sense of life itself as the sort of thing you need Prozac to pursue.

A distinguished Australian scientist says what those of us who have giggled through Don DeLillo’s White Noise know: The smarter we get, the dumber we get. The Age of Information is The Age of the Idjit. “The greater the scientific advance,” one of DeLillo’s characters explains, “the more primitive the fear.”

So universities have to be careful, because millions of highly advanced people believe all sorts of bullshit, especially about medical therapies (“chiropractic, homeopathy, iridology and reflexology”) that don’t belong in university degree programs because no empirical basis exists for them and because they divert resources from legitimate therapies. This blog has chronicled the efforts – often successful in the US – of reputable scientists to keep reputable universities from starting chiropractic programs in particular. A group of concerned international scientists is now “urging the vice chancellors [of Australian universities] to review the teaching of these courses and come up with a statement on the issue when they meet in March.” Quite a number of Australian universities – many of them public-funded – are handing out degrees in pretty whacked-out stuff.

Big intellectual property lawsuit brewing, with the president of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center accused of using research generated at his prior lab – the U Penn’s Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute – to start up a potentially very, very, profitable pharma outfit.

… it’s anti-psychotic time!

… gets some high-profile attention.

David Brooks, New York Times:

Anybody who is on antidepressants, or knows somebody who is, should read Marcia Angell’s series “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?” from The New York Review of Books. Many of us have been taught that depression arises, in part, from chemical imbalances in the brain. Apparently, there is no evidence to support that.

Many of us thought that antidepressants work. Apparently, there is meager evidence to support that, too. They may work slightly better than placebos, Angell argues, but only under certain circumstances. They may also be permanently altering people’s brains and unintentionally fueling the plague of mental illness by causing episodes of mania, for example. I wouldn’t consider Angell the last word on this, but it’s certainly a viewpoint worth learning about.

The latest study suggests antidepressants work no better than placebos.

UD‘s posts about Angell’s essays are here (scroll down).

Surprised that placebos treat depression just as well as expensive, side-effect-ridden anti-depressant pills? Why?

Start here.

… but since then has not been running the classiest of practices. The FBI has just raided one of his numerous, er, pain management facilities; and then there’s the matter of Medicare fraud as well.

Sanjoy Sundaresan seems to have attained positively medieval levels of sadism, withholding drugs from addicts unless they let him impale them with needles in order to bill the federal government for the impaling.

******************************

UD thanks Bill for telling her that the link up there no longer works. Here’s an earlier story about Sundaresan. The details about the needles are taken from the later article.

… weary unto death if you ask me, produces one farcical story after another.

Insistent on an organic rather than psychiatric basis for their syndrome, some British CFS people make it a point to harass university researchers who fail to find said organic basis.

Professor [Myra] McClure [,tormented for having eliminated one viral candidate, the XMRV retrovirus,] says she will not be doing any further research in this area, and that may be the single most important consequence of this campaign of abuse and intimidation.

CFS is equally farcical on the other side, among scientists. The chick who claimed the now-discredited XMRV viral basis – she was associated with a lab at the University of Nevada – is now under arrest for “possession of stolen property and unlawfully taking computer data and equipment.”

Because… let’s see here… ach, my muscles ache from trying to piece this Keystone Kops plot together… Okay so like after she published her thing about yes there’s this viral basis the paper was retracted because no one can replicate the thing and people in her lab said the result might have just been “contamination” or maybe outright data manipulation or omg whatever.

So the university institute fired her and she apparently tried to steal all her data so she could take the NIH-sponsored work someplace else. Only NIH doesn’t let you do that, you know … just up and decamp with your shit… Plus bigger problem is that you’re not supposed to steal things.

On 22 November, [Judy] Mikovits posted $100,000 bail after spending four nights in jail in Ventura, California, as a “fugitive”, according to a county-court docket. She is accused of possessing stolen lab notebooks, a computer and other material belonging to the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI), a private research centre in Reno, Nevada, where she was research director. Mikovits faces extradition to Nevada, while the WPI is seeking the materials’ return in a separate civil suit.

… lead the headlines at Brown University, where two inexplicable things are happening. Keller remains on the faculty, and a masturbation “spree” is afoot. Ahand?

Keller, as readers of this blog know, is one of the three official biggest baddest boys of academic medicine (along with Joseph Biederman and Charles Nemeroff). All men have undergone titanic struggles with conflict of interest regs, and in the process drawn plenty of attention to their schools, as well as to the quality of their research.

The latest effort to draw attention to the Keller scandal involves the non-profit Healthy Skepticism, which has written a letter to Brown asking its assistance in getting an apparently ghostwritten Paxil article by Keller retracted. Brown has been sitting on its hands.

Which you can’t say about the people involved in what reporter Lucy Feldman describes as “College Hill’s inexplicable months-long masturbation spree.”

Pigs on campus.

… Libra, is “the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.”

But Joyce is more likely to have written the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM’s predecessor, four, has a thousand pages, and we may be sure that five will have many more than that. It’s a megaton psychotropic prescription machine. As Allen Frances, editor of earlier, more sane, DSMs, writes, “DSM-5 is suggesting many new and untested diagnoses and also markedly reduced thresholds for old ones.”

Frances offers an example:

‘Attenuated psychosis syndrome’ will have a ridiculously high false positive rate ( 80-90%), no effective treatment, would promote unnecessary exposure to harmful antipsychotics, and would cause needless worry and stigma. Since studies prove conclusively that the symptoms are so very rarely predictive of psychosis, why in the world would DSM-5 give someone the stigmatizing and absurdly misleading label ‘attenuated psychosis syndrome’ and open the door to inappropriate antipsychotic use? Recognizing all these risks, a large portion of schizophrenia and prodromal researchers are sensibly opposed to the inclusion of ‘attenuated psychosis syndrome’ in DSM-5. But unaccountably, the work group stubbornly clings to its proposal and, without the petition, there is a good chance it may sneak into DSM-5.

In great part, the DSM-5 is a work of the imagination. Like all ambitious novels, it exhibits enormous scope and imaginative energy. Told from the point of view of a detached omniscient narrator, it chronicles the plummeting of populations into pre-psychosis, and their ultimate rescue by “the number one revenue producer of all classes of drugs,” anti-psychotics. Its pages evoke a les misérables America, massively prodromal, holding out its butyrophenone-bowl on every street corner.

In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny.

… In a survey of more than 2,000 American psychologists scheduled to be published this year, Leslie John of Harvard Business School and two colleagues found that 70 percent had acknowledged, anonymously, to cutting some corners in reporting data. About a third said they had reported an unexpected finding as predicted from the start, and about 1 percent admitted to falsifying data.

The ruler of this universe seems to be ex-Harvard psychology professor Marc Hauser (scroll down), and his long slow downfall is certainly instructive; but really where is the American Psychological Association? UD gathers the APA is the official organization here… UD fears the APA has, at the very least, co-dependency and enabling issues.

A far more healthy research model is the open rollicking naughtiness of the American Psychiatric Association, with its Schatzbergs and Nemeroffs and Biedermans and all. The first APA is getting all weepy and neurotic; the second hums happily along.

… has died. Both immunologists, they worked together at the National Institutes of Health in the 1960s (UD‘s father spent his whole career at NIH).

I can’t find papers they co-authored, but they cited each other a lot. Benacerraf’s name, for instance, shows up as the last reference in this paper (UD‘s father is Herbert J. Rapp), “Heterogeneity of Rabbit IgM Antibody as Detected by C′1a Fixation.”

Forty years ago, when most clinical research took place in academic settings, the main dangers to research subjects came in service to genuine scientific aims. A large regulatory apparatus was developed to protect human subjects from the ambitions of overweening academic researchers. In the early 1990s, however, pharmaceutical companies realized that it was faster and less expensive to conduct trials in the private sector, where the driving force is not knowledge, but profit. And the regulatory apparatus designed for the old era has proved woefully inadequate for the new one.

UD‘s friend Carl Elliott, in today’s New York Times, warns about the disintegration of legitimate research, and the harm that can come – under a new commercial regime – to human subjects.