And as we approach a new year, University Diaries will continue to pursue the links between corporate-sponsored psychiatry research at some of America’s most high-profile universities, and the destructive, expensive pathologizing of the American public. ““[T]he increase in diagnoses [of mental illness in America] is a boon to pharmaceutical manufacturers,” notes a Forbes writer. “The new generation of psychoactives has displaced cholesterol-reducing medications as the biggest-selling class of drugs in the U.S.” It wouldn’t be happening without Harvard’s Joseph Biederman and the rest of the COI university crew.

There’s hope. But only a little bit of hope. The battle has to be fought hard, and we’ll probably lose.

But anger over the money culture behind pharma investment, and at the damage being done to our children by anti-psychotics, will no doubt find greater focus and expression this coming year. UD will of course follow the story.

… 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.”

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.

[W]e medicate increasing numbers of children with potentially harmful psychotropic drugs, a trend fueled in part by questionable and under-regulated pharmaceutical industry practices. In the early 2000s, for example, drug companies withheld data suggesting that such drugs were more dangerous and less effective for children and teenagers than parents had been led to believe. The law now requires “black box” warnings on those drugs’ labels, but regulators have done little more to protect children from sometimes unneeded and dangerous drug treatments.

Universities should consider whether their medical faculties include people who, either through involvement in corporate ghostwriting, conflict-of-interest shilling for the pharmaceutical industry, or questionable experimental practices, are contributing to this vile trend by lending an impression of research neutrality to it. Don’t let your university be used in this way. As with the Joseph Biederman fallout at Harvard, it will ultimately hurt your school.

Harvard University’s Joseph Biederman must be smiling.

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UD thanks David for the link.

… a powerful writer, gets to the core of a complex situation. This is from today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

… Virtually all researchers say they are not influenced by drug company money. Doctors rarely out-and-out lie about their research, but spin influences how a study is set up, its statistical analysis and interpretation. Research on drug studies repeatedly shows that drug trial results are tilted toward a positive description of the drug’s effects when the research is funded by a drug company rather than the government or an independent agency.

Big Pharma money is most powerful when promoting [Joseph] Biederman‘s research and point of view over competing models. Drug companies copy and mail his important papers on psychiatric drugs to every American physician working with children. A member of the Biederman team is at every important meeting on children’s psychiatric issues and medical education. Their presence, and often the conference, itself, are supported by drug industry dollars.

Only when children die or side effects are severe – as in the FDA hearings on children and antidepressants in 2004, and in the recent publicity over obesity and diabetes caused by the bipolar drugs – do opposing viewpoints get the country’s eyes and ears.

Biederman’s conflict of interest problems have exposed his strong pro-drug views to the public for scrutiny. Until now, fear of the Biederman team has operated quietly on the small club of child psychiatric researchers. Only when 2-year-olds started taking three psychiatric drugs simultaneously under a Biederman protocol for bipolar disorder did the emperor’s clothes become so invisible as to begin the naming of names…

Two-year-olds on three drugs simultaneously. Jesus.