Drug Companies – The New Sin Stocks

A column in the American Chronicle by John Carey

It is part of the American dream to put a dollar into a company stock today, and get lots of dollars back when you sell. The only modifier to this dream by some is an aversion towards "sin" stocks – avoiding companies that make alcohol, cigarettes, pornography, guns or provide gambling.

But when I suggest that you pitch drug-companies into this same sin-bucket you probably think I´m joking. But I´ll let you in on my reasoning, which includes numerous lawsuits against the companies, lying by the company executives to market their drugs under false pretenses for profit´s sake, and drugs pushed on the public which knowingly harm more people with the side-effects than they ever help.

Side Effects

All drugs have side-effects! Taken for a short time to cure something worse, it is a beneficial exchange. But drug companies can´t make the huge profit for an antibiotic you take for two weeks as they can for a "mental-health" pill you take every day for the rest of your life!

With the first group of antipsychotics marketed, drug companies freed many people from the state hospitals. But one debilitating side-effect of these drugs (like Thorazine, Haldol and Prolixin) was that they caused involuntary, repetitive, and purposeless movements. In the 1990s, newer drugs called atypical drugs (like Clozaril, Zyprexa, Seroquel, Geodon and Risperdal) largely replaced the older meds and were marketed (at eight to twenty times the cost of the prior drugs) as causing fewer involuntary movements, but they have their own side-effects such as weight gain, diabetes and early death.

Tens of thousands of people sued Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca, saying that their drugs, Zyprexa and Seroquel, gave them diabetes and elevated blood sugar levels. Eli Lilly reports having paid $1.2 billion to settle over 30,000 lawsuits.

In 2008, Alaska sued Eli Lilly for the medical costs of Medicaid patients who developed diabetes while taking Zyprexa. One of Eli Lilly´s top executives sent an email encouraging Lilly to promote Zyprexa for a use not approved by federal drug regulators (known as "off label") and while doctors can prescribe a drug "off label", it is against federal law for a drug company to encourage this practice. Alaska settled with Lilly for $15 million and now other states are going after this legalized drug pusher. (Global sales of Zyprexa approached $4.8 BILLION in 2007.) Lilly also faces 1,200 cases as well as a federal probe over its marketing tactics.

Janssen's Risperdal got FDA approval to expand the use of the drug to address adolescent schizophrenia, the irritability of autism in kids and for bipolar disorder. In 2006, it was the most heavily prescribed psychiatric drug in New York´s Medicaid kids program, given to 17,393 children. It is also blamed in lawsuits nationwide for side-effects including diabetes caused by weight gain, Parkinson's-like movement disorders and gynecomastia, in which males grow breasts which have to be surgically removed.

The pharmaceutical companies have made astronomical profits since promoting the atypicals to treat mental disorders. Since the drug companies couldn´t claim that the atypicals were better than the old drugs, they paid doctors to say so. This brought about a widespread false belief that the newer medications were safer and worth the additional billions of dollars in taxpayer money to make these the states´ preferred drugs of choice. Since then, the life expectancy of people treated in community mental health centers has plunged to a point twenty-five years LESS than the average due to a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease as a side-effect of these drugs. (For comparison sake, being homeless cuts ten years off your life expectancy.) Chuck Areford said in a 2008 article titled "Antipsychotic Drugs are Doing Harm" that this "… must be ranked as one of the worst public health disasters in U.S. history."

Drugs Marketed Under False Pretenses

If you are the CEO of a company, a large part of your multi-million dollar compensation is tied to how well the stock does during your tenure. This has led the companies to promote their drugs much like the rest of Madison Avenue promotes cars or the latest perfume. However, while the brand of car you drive doesn´t adversely affect your health, which psych drug you take to hide your problems does.

The entire basis for the use of psychotropic drugs is a THEORY, not a fact! The media presents it as a fact that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance. However, even the psychiatric bible clearly states that the cause of depression and anxiety is unknown. Jeffrey Lacasse, a doctoral student co-authoring a study on this is quoted as saying, "… there are few scientists who will rise to its defense, and some prominent psychiatrists publicly acknowledge that the serotonin hypothesis is more metaphor than fact."

In 2006 4-year-old Rebecca Riley died of an overdose of psychiatric drugs that had never been approved or tested for children. She had been taking drugs for ADD and bipolar since she was two years old and died with four prescription drugs in her system. Her heart and lungs were damaged due to prolonged abuse of the prescription drugs.

Cheyenne Delp, a five year old, died in 2004 while on five prescription medications. One of the anti-depressants required that she undergo an EKG to determine if her heart was healthy enough for her to take it. The child psychiatrist, Dr. Saran Mudumbi, testified that Cheyenne was out of control and that she suffered from paranoia, depression and anxiety.

One of the main psychiatrists pushing treatment of children with psychatric drugs is Dr. Biederman who has financial ties with fifteen drug companies and serves as a paid speaker or adviser to half of them, including Eli Lilly & Co. (Zyprexa) and Janssen Pharmaceuticals (Risperdal).

A drug is approved by the FDA for narrow uses, but gets tried off-label on hard-to-treat conditions and the drug company´s sales force stokes up this usage until the research catches up years later that shows the initial enthusiasm was unfounded. With the limited schizophrenic and bipolar market for the atypicals, the drug companies marketed them as safer than their predecessors They came to be tried beyond the approved uses for nursing-home residents, prisoners, and children younger than six years old. Total U.S. sales for this class of drugs reached $13 billion in 2007, doubling the sales just five years earlier.

Research by three universities says long-term use of anti-psychotics offers "no long-term benefit for most patients." And while anti-psychotic medication is not licensed to treat dementia it is being given to 100,000 elderly patients in England to keep them manageable! Studies show that these drugs increase the risk of strokes and other harmful side effects. One study showed that after 3½ years, 60% of the Alzheimer´s patients given a placebo were still alive while only 28% of the group given the anti-psychotic medication were.

While an estimated 30-60% of U.S. nursing home patients are placed on antipsychotics, at the Bronx´s Providence Rest nursing home, the staff give massages to the patients. Utilizing this therapy, the nursing home has cut its use of antipsychotics to 2-3%, the lowest rate of any nursing home in New York!

The drug companies funded the committees which set up the state plans for defining which drugs to use for which treatments. Drug company profits then soared because the atypicals were listed as the first three choices over the older generic drugs. The states´ medical costs for patient care also soared! Now that the links to the drug company funding and the terrible side-effects have become known, nine states have sued Eli Lilly, four sued Janssen, and two sued AstraZeneca. Dozens of more states have teamed in a joint investigation, seeking billions of dollars in restitution for money they say they overpaid for atypicals through Medicaid.

In Minnesota alone, since 2002, drug companies have given $88 million in gifts, grants and fees to Minnesota doctors and caregivers. Several states, including Pennsylvania, are suing some drug makers for promoting their drugs beyond approved uses and commissioning "ghost-written" articles to increase sales

Drug companies fund and support front groups like NAMI and CHADD and programs such as TeenScreen, in order to create a demand for their products covertly. These groups may not promote drugs directly but rather they promote disorders, legitimizing mental illnesses that have never been validated as true medical diseases. Drug companies cannot make these claims directly but accomplish the same goal through these other groups and programs. TeenScreen, an invention of psychiatrist (with drug company connections) David Shaffer, is a screening program asking children as young as 9-years-old questions like, "Have you often felt very nervous when you´ve had to do things in front of people?" and "Are you Hispanic or Latino?" Based on their answers, TeenScreen refers them to mental health "professionals", who inevitably decide that these children have symptoms defined as "mental disorders", writing prescriptions for antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs for children with no objective medical testing. TeenScreen´s staff and advisory board are loaded with ties to Big Pharma.

(See: http://www.teenscreentruth.com/teenscreen_advisory_board.htm).

TeenScreen´s Director, Laurie Flynn was formerly at the helm of NAMI, which received over 11 million dollars in drug company funding from ´96 to ´99: Janssen ($2.08 million), Novartis ($1.87 million), Pfizer ($1.3 million), Abbott Laboratories ($1.24 million), Wyeth-Ayerst Pharmaceuticals ($658,000), Bristol-Myers Squibb ($613,505) and Eli Lilly $2.87 million.

In 2008 researchers using the Freedom of Information Act, dug out information on Prozac that shows it is no more effective than a placebo! The study included clinical trials that Eli Lilly chose not to publish when they studied the drug. The data showed that patients had improved - but those on the placebo improved just as much! (The only exception was in the most severely depressed patients.) 40 million people take this drug, earning tens of billions of dollars for Eli Lilly.

Is it the same sin to give capital to Playboy as it is to molest a woman? That is a question that only you can decide (with perhaps help from your pastor), but it doesn´t take much of a leap to imagine someone viewing porn and then going out and committing rape. You aren´t on the corner selling crack but you are just as guilty if you gave the crack dealer $10,000 to finance his supply.

Who knows what potentials for bad hearts, mis-wired brains and early deaths these drug companies have caused our society in their profit-search for a daily-pill-solution to what ails us? If putting money ahead of people´s lives and preying on those needing real help doesn´t make you a sin company, I don´t know what does.

So whether you now agree that pharmaceutical company stocks belong in the sin-stock category, or you simply believe that there are just too many liabilities for these companies to be good investments, either reason is enough to remove them from your portfolio forever.

Neither the author of this article nor his family will profit financially in any manner from drug stocks losing value

The suicide rate now is roughly where it was in 1965 despite 20 years of sticking Americans on anti-depressants

Furious season has a quick summary of a long article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine on Suicide. One tidbit of note:

I also admire his pointing out that the suicide rate now is roughly where it was in 1965 despite 20 years of sticking Americans on anti-depressants and the like, and that once some would-be jumpers are stopped, they never again try to kill themselves.

.Here's the quote from the NY times:

Then there is the most disheartening aspect of the riddle. The National Institute of Mental Health says that 90 percent of all suicide “completers” display some form of diagnosable mental disorder. But if so, why have advances in the treatment of mental illness had so little effect? In the past 40 years, whole new generations of antidepressant drugs have been developed; crisis hotline centers have been established in most every American city; and yet today the nation’s suicide rate (11 victims per 100,000 inhabitants) is almost precisely what it was in 1965.

Would it be too much to say that maybe they are not diagnosing the correct problem? That changing and rotating the tires will not fix a blown engine?

World Experts Demand End to Child Drugging in the US - Part II

By Evelyn Pringle and as seen here. You can read Part I here, and see earlier columns on our site here

Mathy Milling Downing was a featured speaker at the annual conference of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology and told the audience that her anger is directed toward the FDA and drug companies, "for their incompetence and lack of concern for innocent children they have helped to kill, my little girl included."

Her 12-year-old daughter, Candace, hung herself from the valence of her bed on January 10, 2004, after being prescribed the antidepressant drug Zoloft for "test anxiety" at school.

Experts in the field of psychiatry and child development from all over the world attended this year's annual conference in Washington with the agenda aimed at ending the mental health screening programs put in place by the Bush Administration's New Freedom Commission and the mass-drugging of children with psychiatric drugs.

Child With PillDuring her presentation, Ms Downing said she objected to placing Candace on drugs but was assured that Zoloft was safe and did not learn until after her daughter's death that "up to four children out of every hundred run a risk of dying by their own hand or at least attempt to."

Had she been given the opportunity to have informed consent on the dangers of SSRI's, she said, "my child would still be alive."

"I never would have allowed my child to be placed on a drug with no proven efficacy and a history of possible harm," Ms Downing stated.

She described how she tried to contact doctors at the FDA numerous times to express her concerns, and no one was ever available to speak to her. She filed a complaint with MedWatch on March 18, 2004, and, "I am still waiting for my reply," she stated.

"One would think that the FDA would support the needs of Americans over the greed of the various pharmaceutical corporations," she said, "but that continues to be a pipe dream of mine rather than a reality."

Critics say TeenScreen, billed as a suicide prevention tool, is nothing more than a drug marketing scheme developed by the pharmaceutical industry and a front group operating under cover of Columbia University to establish a customer base within the nation's 50-odd million school children for the new generation of psychiatric drugs, including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants (SSRI's) and atypical antipsychotics.

These so-called new "wonder drugs" include the antidepressants Prozac and Cymbalta by Eli Lilly; Paxil from GlaxoSmithKline; Zoloft by Pfizer; Celexa and Lexapro from Forest Labs; Effexor by Wyeth, as well as generic versions of the drugs. The atypical antipsychotics include Zyprexa by Lilly; Risperdal, marketed by Janssen Pharmaceuticals; Abilify by Bristol-Myers Squibb; Clozaril by Novartis, and Geodon by Pfizer.

Best-selling author of "Mad in America", Robert Whitaker, tracked the profits of these "wonder drugs" since the first SSRI, Prozac, arrived on the market in 1987 and found a tremendous rise in the cost to taxpayers. In 1987, psychotropic medication expenditures were about $1 billion, but by 2004, in a 40-fold increase, the cost had risen to $23 billion.

According to Mr Whitaker's analysis, global sales of antipsychotics went from $263 million in 1986 to $8.6 billion in 2004, and antidepressant sales rose from $240 million in 1986 to $11.2 billion in 2004.

In the paper, "Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America," published in the Spring 2005 issue of the Journal of Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Mr Whitaker also reports that, in addition to breaking sales records, within 10 years on the market, "Prozac quickly took up the top position as America's most complained about drug." He further states:

"By 1997, 39,000 adverse-event reports about it had been sent to MedWatch. These reports are thought to represent only 1% of the actual number of such events, suggesting that nearly 4 million people in the US had suffered such problems, which included mania, psychotic depression, nervousness, anxiety, agitation, hostility, hallucinations, memory loss, tremors, impotence, convulsions, insomnia and nausea."

According to the paper, "It is well-known that all of the major classes of psychiatric drugs - anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, benzodiazepines, and stimulants for ADHD - can trigger new and more severe psychiatric symptoms in a significant percentage of patients."

Ms Downing has been on a non-stop crusade to prevent the death of more children since her daughter died and the family's tragedy is featured in the documentary, "Prescription: Suicide," which also includes the story of 6 families effected by their encounters with SSRIs and how their lives changed forever. A copy of the film is available on the Participate Now web site at www.participatenow.net.

Candace should never have been given Zoloft because it was never approved for use with kids. Prozac is the only SSRI approved for children in the US because it is the only drug reportedly shown to be effective in two pediatric clinical trials, a requirement that must be met to obtain FDA approval.

But according to ICSPP founder and leading SSRI authority Dr Peter Breggin, the term "effective" has little meaning because all a drug company has to do is show better results in kids treated with an SSRI than in children taking a placebo and can conduct 100 trials if need be to get the two positive studies. It stands to reason that with 50-50 odds, if enough trials are conducted, an SSRI is bound to do better than a placebo eventually.

However, with that in mind, experts say it's important to note that, other than Prozac, the SSRI makers have not been able to provide the FDA with 2 positive studies out of all the clinical trials that have been conducted in hopes of obtaining FDA approval for the sale of SSRI's to kids.

That said, SSRI makers have made a fortune by getting doctors to prescribe the drugs for unapproved uses. A University of Georgia study in the June 2006 Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that 75% of persons prescribed antidepressants received them off-label. The researchers reviewed records of more than 106,000 Medicaid recipients in 2001 to examine the rates of off-label prescribing of drugs that act on the central nervous system and found 75% of antidepressant patients received the drugs for unapproved uses.

"More than two-thirds of the studies of antidepressants given to children showed that the medications were no more effective than a placebo, and most of the positive results came from drug company sponsored trials," Dr Karen Effrem reported in her presentation at the ICSPP conference.

Litigation against drug companies has established this fact. In 2004, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer brought fraud charges against Glaxo for hiding studies that "not only failed to show any benefit for the drug in children but demonstrated that children taking Paxil were more likely to become suicidal than those taking a placebo." Two months later, Glaxo agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle the charges.

Mr Spitzer pointed out that Paxil was never approved to treat any condition in children, and yet doctors prescribed the drug to kids two million times in 2002, the same year that Paxil became Glaxo's top seller with $3.8 billion in sales.

On November 1, 2006, the Associated Press reported that Glaxo "has agreed to pay $63.8 million to settle a lawsuit's claims that it promoted its antidepressant drug Paxil for use by children and adolescents while withholding negative information about the medication's safety and effectiveness."

Critics say it's not difficult to track the industry money involved in the promotion of TeenScreen. The program's Executive Director, Laurie Flynn, was the Executive Director of National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) for 16 years, which bills itself as a patient advocacy group, but in reality is the most heavily industry-funded front group in the US.

Mother Jones Magazine obtained NAMI documents for the period between 1996 and mid-1999, while Ms Flynn was running the show, which revealed that NAMI received a total of $11.72 million during that 3-year period from 18 drug companies, including Janssen, $2.08 million; Novartis, $1.87 million; Pfizer, $1.3 million; Abbott Laboratories, over $1.24 million; Wyeth-Ayerst, $658,000, and Bristol-Myers Squibb, $613,505.

NAMI's top donor during that period was none other than Lilly, the maker of Prozac and Zyprexa, which coughed up a total of $2.87 million out of the goodness of its heart.

Ms Flynn also wrote an article promoting TeenScreen entitled, "Before Their Time: Preventing Teen Suicide," in which she stated: "The TeenScreen Program developed 10 years ago by Columbia University and offered in partnership with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill helps communities across the nation identify teens with mental illness who might be at risk for suicide."

If TeenScreen is "offered in partnership" with NAMI, critics say, it goes without saying that millions of dollars of drug company money was invested in the program.

The efforts to implement TeenScreen by use of "this partnership" cannot be understated. A video-taped presentation at the annual convention of NAMI, obtained by researcher Sue Weibert, shows the TeenScreen crew telling the army of NAMI members from all across the country that helping set up TeenScreen might require contacting a child's insurance company to check on coverage or driving a child to an appointment with a psychiatrist.

The video also shows the presenter passing around a notebook for signatures from members who would be willing to act as volunteers and rise up against anyone who speaks out against TeenScreen.

The presenter also explains the importance of bribing kids with movie coupons, pizza or other perks, because parents won't agree to allow the children to be screened, so they need to win the kids over first and send them home to talk the parents.

Early on, NAMI and TeenScreen did not even hide the fact that drug money was funding the screening. In June 2002, the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Update Newsletter reported that NAMI and Columbia University sponsored the screening of 170 Nashville students with TeenScreen and that the survey was funded by grants from AdvoCare and Eli Lilly.

But two years later, in March 2004, Ms Flynn appeared at a congressional hearing trying to drum up the allocation of tax dollars to set up TeenScreen in public schools. During her testimony, she as much as defined the customer base the drug companies were after when she told the lawmakers that, "close to 750,000 teens are depressed at any one time, and an estimated 7-12 million youth suffer from mental illness."

On September 27, 2007, psychologist Michael Shaughnessy, professor in Educational Studies at the Eastern New Mexico University and columnist for the educational news and information site, EdNews.org, was interviewed about his views on TeenScreen by Doyle Mills, an independent researcher in Clearwater, Florida who was instrumental in blocking TeenScreen from setting up shop in schools in Pinellas and Hillsborough Counties, two of Florida's most populated counties, and has published several articles critical of TeenScreen.

Mr Mills shared his interview with Dr Shaughnessy at the ICSPP conference, in which the Professor called TeenScreen "a program aimed at locating, identifying and procuring new customers for the mental health industry."

He says TeenScreen is a creation of psychiatrist David Shaffer, a paid spokesman for Lilly and paid consultant for drug companies Hoffman la Roche, Wyeth and Glaxo.

TeenScreen started out by claiming the program was free and required no government funding. But as it turns out, taxpayers are funding this marketing scheme from start to finish. Government money is being used to set up TeenScreen in schools all over the US and tax dollars are paying not only for the follow-up visits to prescribing shrinks but also for the majority of drugs prescribed.

The pilot programs of TeenScreen in five counties in Ohio were funded by five $15,000 grants allocated by mental health boards within the Ohio Department of Mental Health.

Medicaid record show that taxpayers in Ohio are footing the bill for most of the child drugging as well. In July 2004, over 39,000 children covered by Medicaid were found to be taking drugs for depression, anxiety, delusions, hyperactivity and violent behavior, and Medicaid spent more than $65 million for mental health drugs prescribed to children in 2004, according to an investigation by the Columbus Dispatch.

The massive drugging of patients covered by public health care programs is similar in states all across the US. In 5 years, prescription costs for Iowa Medicaid increased 82.5%, and by class, antipsychotics reflected the largest increase for mental health drugs.

In 2005, while the average cost for a first generation antipsychotic to Medicaid was only $36 a month, a month's supply for a new antipsychotics cost between $100 - $1,000, according to the December 8, 2005, Mental Health Subcommittee Report to the Medical Assistance Pharmaceutical and Therapeutics Committee.

For the record, TeenScreen is not free, and it is costing tax payers a bundle. On November 17, 2004, the University of South Florida announced the receipt of a grant of $98,641 from the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to expand the TeenScreen program in the Tampa Bay area.

Florida Medicaid is also being bilked. On July 29, 2007, the St Petersburg Times reported that, in the last 7 years, the cost to taxpayers for atypicals prescribed to kids rose nearly 500%, and on average it cost Medicaid nearly $1,800 per child in 2006.

The Times reported that more than 18,000 kids on Medicaid were prescribed antipsychotics in 2006, including 1,100 under the age of 6 and some as young as 3, even though guidelines from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration says that, with children under 6, psychotropic drugs should "only be considered under the most extraordinary of circumstances."

In setting up TeenScreen to screen students in Brimfield, Illinois, "organizing the system and employing a part-time counselor specifically for the program is estimated to cost about $100 per student," the July 11, 2005, Peoria, Illinois Journal Star reported.

Overall, the "Brimfield High School program alone will cost around $20,000 for the first semester," the Journal noted.

The TeenScreen gang claims that it always obtains parental consent prior to screening students and that it does not diagnose students with mental disorders.

However, Michael and Teresa Rhoades, from Indiana, attended the DC conference and as a featured speaker, Teresa described how her daughter was TeenScreened in December 2004, without parental consent, and was told that she had not one, but 2 mental illnesses.

Teresa recalled the day that her distraught daughter came home and informed her parents that she had been diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder and a social anxiety disorder.

Michael and Teresa say they were furious to the point that they filed the nation's first lawsuit against TeenScreen, charging that their daughter was wrongly screened, diagnosed, and labeled mentally ill in a public school without their consent.

"TeenScreen itself is a questionnaire with invasive and probing questions which indoctrinate young people into a belief that all their feelings and behaviors are indications of a mental disorder," Dr Shaughnessy told Mr Mills in the interview.

He said, "the child is convinced of it, the parent is convinced of it, and then the child becomes a customer of TeenScreen's local mental health 'partner,' which sells counseling or drugs and profits tens of thousands of dollars per child."

Dr Shaughnessy acknowledged that adolescence is a hard time for everyone but said, "maybe it's supposed to be," that's how we learn.

He says TeenScreen labels the normal pain and uncertainty of adolescence as a mental disorder for profit and asks, "When did adolescence become a disease or something unnatural or deadly that needs intervention if anyone is going to make it through?"

""What a ridiculous concept," Dr Shaughnessy added.

He also points out that school records for children are intended to be secure but says, once committed to paper or computer, nothing can be 100% secure. "Normal school records are fairly harmless no matter who sees them," he states.

"TeenScreen records on the other hand," he warns, "contain unscientific evaluations which can be taken to mean that the child has a permanent, incurable mental disorder."

He also says these records can then be used against a child as an adult, to take away his rights, limit his opportunities or "just as a horrible embarrassment."

"As there is no scientific way to prove that anyone has a mental disorder," Dr Shaughnessy points out, "there is likewise no scientific way to disprove it."

He told Mr Mills that this is one aspect that parents are never made aware of prior to allowing TeenScreen access to their children. "Once a person is diagnosed, he may never be able to escape that label," he warns.

Advocates against school screening have set up a web site that lists the TeenScreen locations throughout the US, which also posts a petition for people opposed to the program to sign at [TEENSCREEN-LOCATIONS.com]

Psychiatrist Sues Columbia University After Being Fired, was Critical of Teen Screen Shrink

Seen in the NY Times

Two prominent psychiatrists clashed frequently over small details and big money, over research priorities and ethics, and in the end Columbia University’s child psychiatry department was not big enough to hold both of them, colleagues said.

Now, one psychiatrist is suing the university for wrongful termination and charging that the other engineered his ouster in a Machiavellian plot that went on for years.

In the suit, filed last week in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Dr. Peter Jensen, formerly the director of the Ruane Center for the Advancement of Children’s Mental Health at Columbia, contends that after he was hired by the university in 1999, Dr. David Shaffer, director of the university’s child psychiatry division, continually undermined his work. By making derogatory comments and subjecting Dr. Jensen’s work to unfair scrutiny, the lawsuit says, Dr. Shaffer helped force Dr. Jensen out of his job.

Dr. Jensen — who said that, among other things, Dr. Shaffer had called him “the Brad Pitt of psychiatry” — is seeking about $15 million in damages from the university.

[...]

Beginning in 2005, according to the suit, officials at the Research Foundation for Mental Health, an independent review board that monitors research grants in the state, identified several violations in Dr. Jensen’s research.

In an interview yesterday, Dr. Jensen would not specify what the violations were. He said that the university had approved other studies, with similar methods, without finding ethics problems.

[...]

Dr. Jensen and Dr. Shaffer were continually at odds over research, according to colleagues. One of Dr. Shaffer’s projects is TeenScreen, a standardized questionnaire meant to assess potential suicide risk in adolescents.

The voluntary screening, which has been used by more than 400 schools, is controversial among many parents and patient advocates, who say it can stigmatize youngsters who are struggling but are not mentally ill or at risk of suicide. Dr. Jensen said that he was less eager to promote TeenScreen than Dr. Shaffer, and that this created tension as well.

The two doctors also drew research financing from the same source, a fund set up by an investor in New York, William J. Ruane, which paid Dr. Jensen’s $220,000 yearly salary. The lawsuit says that the university owed Dr. Jensen three years’ salary.

It's hard to know who to root for in this case, since both sides probably have things to hide. Comes with the territory

Youth Suicide Rates Up? Not So Fast

We have previously looked at the 2004 increase in youth suicides, falsely blamed on a decrease of antidepressant prescriptions. Now someone has looked at the numbers in detail:

The headlines read, "Highest increase in youth suicide" and "girls aged 10-14 increased 75%." And of course, the only explanation anyone seems to want to debate is antidepressants: was it too many prescriptions, or too few? And self-righteous indignation all around.

Well, I did something apparently no one else cares to do: I looked up the individual suicides. They are individuals, right? With different reasons for doing things? And guess what? I have another explanation: Ohio.

The year in question is 2004, the most recent year the data is available. I focused on girls aged 10-14, because that's what the majority of the news articles focused on. Most reports described an increase of 75%, from 56-94. I actually found 98 total suicides in this group.

If antidepressants had any effect-- in either direction-- then the increase should have been spread out throughout the country.

Most states had very few suicides in this demographic. Maine had zero. North Carolina had 1. Oregon, 1. Florida, 1. Etc. These small numbers are generally unchanged from 2003. California, which had the one of the highest absolute number of suicides, had 6 in 2003, and 7 in 2004.

If you look at Ohio, however, you see something interesting. In 2003, there were no suicides. In 2004, there were 11.

Indiana was next: 0 in 2003, 6 in 2004.

This, of course, speaks to the problem of medicine’s over-reliance on epidemiology. People are different, and even “matched controls” have such variability that association studies are often nearly useless. This is even more true in psychiatry. Suicide is not an involuntary pathogen, it is a complex, volitional behavior whose causes can only be meaningfully investigated at an individual level.

I have to go back and look closely at all the states' data, etc. But it seems to me that when two small states account for almost half of the entire increase in the suicides, we should stop talking about antidepressants and maybe go find out what the hell happened over there?

Those blessed with an evil wit will point out the preponderance of political advertising in Ohio during that elections year. The more cynical will point to the arrival of Teen Screen on the scene in Ohio at about this time, something that might or might not be relevant.

BBC Report on Teen Screen

As reported on the BBC Radio 4 All in the Mind

Mental Health Screening programmes in the USA have been growing. Teenscreen, a programme developed at Columbia University, is one of the biggest. It now covers schools in 43 states across North America.

When Chelsea Rhoades was 15 she was given a mental health screening examination without her parents' knowledge at her High School in Indiana. The Rhoades family is suing the school for violating the parents' constitutional rights to control the care, custody and upbringing of their daughter.

Claudia Hammond speaks to Chelsea’s mother, Teresa Rhoades and John Whitehead, President and Founder of The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties organisation, representing the Rhoades family in this case. She also talks to Melvin Oatis, Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine's Child Study Center and UK-based Joanna Moncrieff of the Critical Psychiatry Network.

Listen to the full original show here, or just this segment via You Tube. The Psych Data weblog also has a partial transcript