by Alison Bass | Oct 22, 2008 | Uncategorized
A bewildered tone seemed to permeate the news reports this week that suicide rates among middle-aged Americans rose sharply from 1999 to 2005. Even the authors of the new analysis in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine said they had no idea why the suicide...
by Alison Bass | Oct 15, 2008 | Uncategorized
The Senate Finance Committee’s probe of physicians with extensive financial conflicts is gathering steam: first, Stanford University removed its psychiatry chief Alan Schatzberg as principal investigator of a federally funded study after Congressional investigators...
by Alison Bass | Oct 5, 2008 | Uncategorized
The academic kingpins who made so money at the trough of Big Pharma are starting to fall. This weekend, Charles Nemeroff stepped down from his post as chairman of Emory’s Department of Psychiatry pending an investigation into allegations that he failed to fully...
by Alison Bass | Sep 28, 2008 | Uncategorized
When I was a reporter for The Boston Globe in the 90s, an employee of Brown University’s department of psychiatry handed me a raft of internal university documents. A number of these documents pertained to an ongoing clinical trial that compared the...
by Alison Bass | Sep 23, 2008 | Uncategorized
In June when the news broke that U.S. Senator Charles Grassley was probing the financial ties between Martin Keller, the chief of psychiatry at Brown University, and the drug industry, Brown officials tried to stonewall the entire issue. They refused to acknowledge...
by Alison Bass | Sep 17, 2008 | Uncategorized
I have to say I’m disappointed with the cover story on bipolar children in Sunday’s New York Times magazine. The author, Jennifer Egan, raises the interesting question about why there has been such a sharp increase in the diagnosis of childhood bipolar...
by Alison Bass | Sep 10, 2008 | Uncategorized
Judging by its response to the Senate Finance Committee, the leadership of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) still doesn’t seem to get it. For the past several months, the Finance Committee has been investigating conflicts of interest between academic...
by Alison Bass | Sep 3, 2008 | Uncategorized
Remember all those dire warnings from the psychiatric community that youth suicides would rise after the FDA put black box warnings on antidepressants in late 2004? The argument was that physicians would be scared away from prescribing these drugs for depressed youth,...
by Alison Bass | Aug 19, 2008 | Uncategorized
Critics of the pharmaceutical industry have long complained that drug companies resort to unscrupulous tactics to market their wares, handpicking friendly researchers (to whom they pay handsome consulting fees) for clinical trials, ghost-writing the results, and...
by Alison Bass | Aug 12, 2008 | Uncategorized
The August doldrums have settled in. Pharmalot is on vacation, as are most state and federal legislators. But there’s a few items I’d like to take note of, since I too was on vacation when this news broke: 1. Stanford University finally saw the light and...
