David Healy
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Web: RxISK.org  the posting of personal experiences with SSRI drugs

[2013 Jan]

Top psychiatrist: Meds behind school massacres  Society conducting 'vast social experiment' without knowing its end.....“Market research, for instance, has made pharmaceutical companies realize it is much harder to sell drugs for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD, in a home or a community where the child’s grandmother is likely to be present,” he explained. “Because, of course, the grandmother may say, ‘That kid doesn’t need pills. His father was just like him, and look, his father turned out alright.’ Medicine intervenes with pills when communities have lost their roots in families.”

[2013] Prozac and SSRIs: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary by Dr. David Healy

[2002 Interview] Prozac, Suicide---Dr. Healy

[2001] Psychopharmacology & The Government Of The Self by David Healy

[2007] Why you should never trust new wonder drugs by Prof David Healy

External links
The David Healy Affair

http://healyprozac.com/

Pediatric bipolar disorder: An object of study in the creation of an illness, by David Healy and Joanna Le Noury, International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, 19 (2007) 209–221.
As outlined above, a number of forces appear to have swept aside traditional academic skepticism with the result that an increasing number of children and infants are being put on cocktails of potent drugs without any evidence of benefit.
.........If the process outlined here was one that could reasonably be expected to lead to benefits it could regarded as therapeutic. But given that there is no evidence for benefit and abundant prima facie evidence that giving the drugs in question to vulnerable subjects in such quantities cannot but produce consequent difficulties for many of these minors, one has to wonder whether we are not witnessing instead a variation on Munchausen’s syndrome, where some significant other wants the individual to be ill and these significant others derive some gain from these proxy illnesses.

When the treatment failed to work, they claimed it was the disease, not the treatment that was at fault. Similarly psychiatry blamed the disease rather than the drugs. Just as we have since done with the SSRIs and suicide. [2001] Psychopharmacology & The Government Of The Self by David Healy

It's virtually impossible to sue a pharmaceutical company in Britain, partly because of the difficulty of getting any funding for such actions.
    There's no point appealing to the government drugs watchdog—the MHRA. It is a small outfit entirely funded by the drug industry.  It has never taken any action against the academics who make fraudulent claims in ghost-written articles, nor doctors working for the companies who repeat such claims, even when they have been shown to be untrue. So the only other body to turn to is the General Medical Council, whose job it is to investigate the conduct of doctors — but it has shown no inclination to act.   Why you should never trust new wonder drugs by Prof David Healy

Public statements about the safety of the drug were a lie; that the company knew Prozac was responsible for a raised risk of suicide and was only slightly more effective than a placebo. Why you should never trust new wonder drugs by Prof David Healy

I just finished reading _Let Them Eat Prozac_ by Dr. David Healy, once a favorite of the pharmaceutical industry. Great book. Lots of inside baseball. I'll let you research it yourself. I just checked out his website, www.healyprozac.com , and found something under "Academic Stalking" that sounds especially familiar:

Drugs such as antibiotics, hypertension drugs and the first treatments for cancer proved their worth in trials.  Until the 1980s, these were run in universities. Independent academics did the research and published the results. But for the past 20 years the drug firms themselves have increasingly run trials. The result has been to undermine the value of the whole system. Now company employees analyse the data and medical journalists are hired to write them up for publication. Then Oxbridge and Ivy League professors are paid several thousand pounds to be credited as the authors of these articles.......I have also seen company memos asking who would be the most 'useful' academics to have as the authors of articles already written.  Once published in top medical journals, these confections will deliver more sales than any number of drug representatives, but all too often they are not accu­rate reports of the trial results.  In other organisations when evidence of disregard for public safety emerges, heads roll. But there have been no resignations following these drug disasters — barely a flicker of embarrassment. Why you should never trust new wonder drugs by Prof David Healy

"In my case, after the issue of the University of Toronto breaching my contract became public in 2001, the media contacted both the university and me. The university directed reporters to J. Coyne, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. The reports that I have from journalists who contacted Dr. Coyne indicate they found his responses off-putting and did not use them. Coyne wrote instead to the Globe and Mail, the British Medical Journal and elsewhere, voicing his concerns that Healy’s research was flawed and the only surprise about the Healy case was that anyone had seen fit to hire him in the first instance.

As it transpired, unbeknownst to me, Coyne had been contributing to a psychology listserv for some time before this. The tone of these communications across a range of issues and people is abusive. The authoritative note when it comes to issues to do with me is surprising given that Coyne has never contacted me for clarification of anything. The bombardment has continued over 6 years, suggesting a certain obsessive preoccupation - or academic stalking. Until recently, I regarded this stalking as a minor irritation.

In 2004, however, the stakes became higher. In February 2004, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) convened a panel to consider the question of suicidality on antidepressants in trials conducted in children. In a first official recognition of this problem, the panel concluded there were grounds for concern. A further hearing was scheduled in September 2004. Prior to the September hearing, Pfizer made a submission to the FDA web site. This was a 50-page “billet doux” full of sweeping accusations about Healy that bore considerable resemblances to the points made by Coyne.

FDA refused to post a response from me. This response was later posted on the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP) web site and appeared as an article in Ethical Human Sciences.

In January 2005, Britain brought in a Freedom of Information Act. I applied to Lilly, Pfizer and GSK to get material they held on me and got 116 pieces of information from Lilly. These suggest that the company put people in audiences when I am presenting, consider legal action against me on the basis of reports that appear in the media, prefer not to fund events in which I am a participant, and have worked out standard responses to Healy issues including dismissing what I do as motivated by involvement as an expert witness in legal actions....

In March 2006, I received a letter from the General Medical Council (GMC), the body with whom all British physicians have to register in order to practice. This is a body that has the powers to strike a physician off. It was a letter of complaint. The letter from the GMC to me contained a letter to the GMC by David Nutt, a professor of psychiatry and psychopharmacology in Bristol, in which Nutt refers to details in the Coyne article as the grounds for a possible complaint...."  http://www.ageofautism.com/2011/07/an-elaborate-fraud-news-analysis-the-british-medical-association-is-standing-up-for-doctors-even-if-it-means-attacking.html