Samizdat Health Writer’s Co-operative Inc.

A writers collective

It’s Always Been One Story

Prozac, arguably the most famous drug of our lifetimes, was never approved for sale.

by Paul John Scott

Rather, Prozac when combined with anti-anxiety medication was approved for sale. In an unpromising design that seems so very much at home with the rest of the strange deeds set forth in this clarifying, well-curated new book, for a third-to-half of the patients studied, the antidepressant fluoxetine was studied as part of a cocktail, even though the approval went to Prozac alone.

This was because, when taken by itself, Prozac made people too agitated.

A Bad Penny

Like a bad penny, this one just keeps coming back.

By Patrick D Hahn

As youth prescriptions for antidepressants have skyrocketed, so have youth suicides. A recent diatribe in MedPage Today by Stephen Soumeri and Ross Koppel is the latest attempt in an ongoing campaign to blame soaring rates on youth suicides not on the drugs but on the FDA black box warning linking these drugs to youth suicide –  an idea was first put forth by statistician Robert Gibbons in 2007. It was easily refuted by data then, and it is just as easily refuted now.

Prescription for Sorrow

One could scarcely have been alive and conscious anywhere in the Western world any time in the past twenty-five years and not have been aware of a raging controversy surrounding antidepressants, suicide, and violence—a controversy that shows no sign of abating. During that same period, prescriptions for antidepressants have skyrocketed. So what is the story?

“Prescription for Sorrow: Antidepressants, Suicide and Violence” by Patrick D. Hahn

Antidepressants, Suicide and Violence

On 14 September 1989, Joseph Wesbecker, a forty-seven-year-old former pressman at Standard Gravure of Louisville, Kentucky, entered his erstwhile place of employment armed with a Polytech AK47S semi-automatic rifle, a Sig Sauer P226 9mm pistol, two MAC 11 9mm machine pistols, a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, a bayonet, and over a thousand rounds of ammunition. Wesbecker opened fire, killing eight employees and wounding twelve more. He also shot up the water sprinklers, and a police officer responding to the scene would later recall the place ran with what looked like rivers of blood.

From the Preface of Prescription for Sorrow by Patrick D. Hahn

Malcharist: Fact or Fiction? Big Pharma, Psychiatry and Ghostwriters

Malcharist, by Paul John Scott, is a fictional account of one of psychiatry’s most influential key opinion leaders (KOLs), his ghostwriter, and a journalist on the trail of a big scandal in the world of Big Pharma. The story didn’t happen in reality, but Scott has done his homework in such a way that one of medicine’s darkest secrets is exposed in all of its sordid detail.

For those of us familiar with industry-sponsored clinical trials such as GlaxoSmithKline’s studies 329 and 352, it doesn’t take much imagination to draw analogies to an all-too-common theme: a psychiatrist and a ghostwriter who helped create an illusion. He takes all the credit for her labors and she disappears into the background. What is presented to the medical community, however, is a story of pharmaceutical marketing masquerading as science.

CounterPunch on The Zyprexa Papers

CounterPunch.org has just published a great review of The Zyprexa Papers, Jim Gottstein’s book about his battle over Zyprexa (Olanzapine) with drug marketing giant Eli Lilly. Written by Bruce E. Levine, a psychologist and social critic, the review addresses the broad social issues raised by Jim Gottstein’s story. “The Zyprexa Papers is not simply about the harm done by blockbuster psychiatric drugs and drug company illegal marketing. It is also about the perversion of the U.S. legal system, as Gottstein illuminates the courts’ use of secrecy orders in settlement agreements to the detriment of the public.”

The lessons of Study 329: How fraud in psychiatric drug research got normalised

Study 329, which was a trial of paroxetine for depression in adolescents, is often held up as the poster child for fraud in clinical trials of psychiatric drugs. In Children of the cure: Missing data, lost lives and antidepressants, David Healy, Joanna Le Noury and Julie Wood painstakingly detail the entire sordid affair, including efforts to get the study retracted and to reanalyse the patient-level data. However, they do so with a larger purpose in mind. Study 329 is not presented as an aberration, but rather as emblematic of a systemic failure in modern medicine (or at least in psychiatry), which leads to prescribing practices that do great harm.

A rollicking good read that gives Pharma a run for its money

Malcharist Review by Annie Bevan Malcharist bounds like a hound as Lee Majors spies with his own eyes, his master is unaware he is up-the-creek, without a paddle. Griffin Wagner is fighting the devil’s work and suddenly his botched-up visions give him a break into a new world where right is wrong and wrong is […]

A Ghost Story: Children of the Cure

I suspect the title of this book by David Healy, Joanna Le Noury, and Julie Wood, was inspired by the Stephen King horror story Children of the Corn.  In the Stephen King story, it is the children who are evil.  In Dr. Healy’s book, it is the adults who are perpetrating evil by exaggerating benefits and minimizing harm of antidepressant use in children. A Review of Children of the Cure by David Antonuccio, Ph.D.

This Novel Will Swallow You Whole

This is a novel that takes the reader deep inside the Pharmaceutical Empire which invents diseases, creates “patient advocacy organizations” to sell these diseases to the public, manufactures and controls the evidence base purporting to show their nostrums are safe and effective remedies for these diseases, relentlessly gaslights those unfortunate victims harmed by their patent medicines, and smears all who question any of this as “Luddites, anti-vaxxers, tin-foil hatters, and Scientologists.”

The Hemingway Effect – Malcharist

This week, Samizdat announces our long-awaited release of Malcharist, an accessible and unusually realistic contemporary fiction work by Paul John Scott. The book is a page-turner about the corruption of clinical trials told through a medical ghostwriter’s crisis of conscience. Set in Manhattan in 2010 and laced with dark humor throughout its fast 352 pages, it […]