The Last Psychiatrist weblog has an interesting take on the recent study released questioning the effectiveness of antidepressants. Here is a large snippet from an article that deserves to be read in full:
An article like this has consequences, widespread social consequences. They are massive, you just don't see it.
Let's say antidepressants really don't work, and this could/should have been known. Have the last 10 years of psychiatry been a lie? It was all a shell game? If so, is anyone going to step up and apologize, take responsibility? "We were wrong, we've been pushing sham treatments-- sorry?" I don't want to hear, "we suspected this..." I want someone to stand up and announce, "you know, I've been prescribing these for years, and I now realize I was duped."
If it's true, then what were we doing to all those patients all those years?
These guys write this as if to say, "I told you so." It's all so clear to them. And to read the interviews, you'd think they were sipping on a Diet Coke-- poured into a glass, with a lime-- smugly announcing what they've known all along.
These guys are hailed as some sort of heroes, exposing the lies of Big Pharma. But they aren't, they are the worst possible self-promoters; they should be ashamed, they should be ashamed to show their faces in public, let alone practice medicine. They are worse than hypocrites, they are unconscious hypocrites.
Before you email me saying, "what-- you didn't want this published? You want them to simply pretend everything is ok, that the data for the meds really isn't weak? That data isn't really being suppressed?" let me state my point as clearly as possible:
THE PROBLEM ISN'T THE STUDY WAS PUBLISHED, THE PROBLEM IS IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED 10 YEARS AGO.
It's the exact same data they had 10 years ago, the exact same data. This isn't a discovery, this isn't Woodward and Bernstein, this is a bunch of academics who are no longer on Pharma payrolls who have now decided that they have nothing further to gain from pushing antidepressants.
Now they can pretend to be on the side of science. We reviewed the data, and found some of it was not published.
You knew that already. You were the ones who didn't publish it-- it's your journal. Turner worked for 3 years as an NIH reviewer. He just notices this now?
Is no one wondering how it is that this study comes out now, when all antidepressants but two are generic?
As suspicious of Pharma as everyone is, no one seems to see that they are no longer getting Pharma money, they are now getting government money-- NIH-- so they're going to push the government line. No one finds it at all suspicious that the two biggest NIH studies in the past two years both found the generic to be the best?
You think that in 2000 those studies would have been published? But now-- 2007, 2008, if they'd found Cymbalta to be the best on the NIH's dime, you think that they'd get re-funded? What's the difference? Same authors, same studies, same data. All that's changed is the climate.
People want a direct financial link to show bias, not realizing that bias is much more prevalent and more powerful elsewhere.
And oh boy, there is going to be hell to pay.
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