[lbo-talk] let's argue about the cause of mental illness

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Thu Aug 27 18:21:29 PDT 2009


At 04:24 PM 8/27/2009, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>to the point.
>
>and (with a tip of the hat to Bill in the other thread) I'd rather have a
>bottle in front of me than have to have a frontal lobotomy, as the old song
>goes. I might be drunk, but at least I'm not insane.
>
>
>/maybe bottle here could be either bottle of booze or bottle of SSRIs

heh. i couldn't find where you wrote it, but you said something earlier is this fork in the thread about weighing risks and benefits, which is what Petersen focuses on throughout. She writes about studies of antidepressents found to be only a slight improvement on nothing. But the slight improvement invariably comes with the side effects.

so how do you weigh that?

and then there's paxil, which the companies own (supressed) studies showed to have no benefit for adolescent depression. In fact, the studies showed that the drug resulted in suicidal ideation at twice the rate among those teens taking the drug. as we now know, GlaxoSmithKline, as the company's now known, supressed the findings. Glaxo's execs sent a letter to sales reps telling that "cutting edge" research demonstrated that paxil had "REMARKABLE efficacy and safety in the treatment of adolescent depression."

She goes on to demonstrate the same problems with surpressed research and outrageous marketing claims for NSAIDS (pain medication), Propulsid (for heartburn), Zanax, Ambien, Claritin, Celebrex, various statin drugs, etc. and so forth.

All of these drugs were marketed on the basis of highly dubious claims about their efficacy and/or by totally supressing negative findings. One study found that 50% of pharmaceutical trials are never published.

The thing is, people aren't able to make a decision weighing costs and benefits because they don't have all the information. And they can't trust their doctors to have it, either. It has been well-known since when I was in grad school, based on studies in the 70s and 80s, that physicians lack the basic skills needed to assess research findings and are very easily influenced by advertisements and marketing press packs, and other gimmicks. These days, they are recruited to ostensibly be the representative or lead researcher on a study when, in fact, the study is completely directed by the company's marketing department. Ghost writers write editorials for the AMA -- a practice that was exposed by a physician who was asked if, for a sum of money, he'd say he wrote such an editorial when in fact it was being written f or him by the pharmaceutical company.

i won't belabor the point. I'm sure this book is scanned to google. :)

so, it's a great idea to weigh costs/benefits for yourself. the problem is, the entire industry is dead set against you actually having access to the information that would allow you to do that.



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