One Quarter of Antidepressant Users Did Not Have Proper Diagnosis
The STAR*D Scandal: A New Paper Sums It All Up - "The STAR*D trial, which was funded by the NIMH at a cost of $35 million and took six years to conduct, was touted as as the "largest antidepressant effectiveness trial ever conducted." As it was designed to study treatment strategies for helping people recover and then stay well, with a one-year followup, it would produce results, the investigators announced at the start of the trial, that would have "substantial public health and scientific significance." As the public well knows now, pharmaceutical funding of antidepressant trials produced scientific literature that was biased and profoundly misleading, a tale of persistent scientific misconduct that has now been reviewed by many authors." By Robert Whitaker
America Fooled, The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived by Timothy Scott a book review
Fact-Checking the New Yorker By Robert Whitaker Created Mar 14 2010 - 8:26am . "In the March 1 issue of the New Yorker, Louis Menand surveyed the topsy-turvy world of treatments for depression, writing in part of the conflicting evidence regarding the efficacy of antidepressants. The strongest evidence for the drugs, he suggested, came from the NIMH's STAR*D trial. Here's what he wrote:
Response to antidepressants is extremely variable. It can take several different prescriptions to find a medication that works. Measuring a single antidepressant against a placebo is not a test of the effectiveness of antidepressants as a category. And there is a well-known study, called the Sequence Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression, or STAR*D trial, in which patients were given a series of different antidepressants. Though only thirty-seven percent recovered on the first drug, another nineteen percent recovered on the second drug, six percent after the third, and five percent after the fourth-a sixty-seven-percent effectiveness rate for antidepressant medication, far better than the rate achieved by a placebo.
That statistic--that two-thirds of the patients eventually "recovered" in the STAR*D trial--has become an oft-cited one. The implication is that if depressed patients try a succession of antidepressants, they are likely to find one that "works" and keeps them well. Unfortunately, the results from the STAR*D trial do not support that belief."
Exercise: the Other Antidepressant
Review: The Emperor's New Drugs and Doctoring the Mind - Antidepressants: A Triumph of Marketing Over Science?
Cold Case Files - Paxil Birth Defects by Evelyn Pringle "Almost like an episode of the TV show, Cold Case Files, the first Paxil birth defect trial was dominated by a story about what happened to the rat pups that died around 1979 and1980, involved in a study in which Paxil was being tested on pregnant female rats.The animal studies giving Paxil to rats and rabbits were conducted by a Danish company called Ferrosan before the drug maker, that later became part of GlaxoSmithKline, purchased the drug. The family's lead attorney in the case of Kilker v Glaxo, Sean Tracey from Houston, brought in the world-famous neuropsychopharmocology expert from Wales, Dr David Healy, to testify extensively about rat pup study 295. In summary, Healy told the jury that all the rat pups born to mothers who received Paxil were dead four days after they were born, while eighty-eight percent of the pups not exposed to Paxil were still alive on day four."
Evelyn Pringle: Paxil Birth Defect Litigation Series
Pilots Taking Antidepressants? The FAA Is Risking Our Lives
Former Pfizer Exec Sues Over Lipitor Marketing By Ed Silverman