Children of the Cure: A frightening and tragic story
A book review by Max Fink, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology Emeritus
StonyBrook University College of Medicine
Children of the Cure
by David Healy, Joanna Le Noury, Julie Wood.
Published by Samizdat Health Writers Co-operative Inc, 2020
Enthusiastic stories of new pill treatments of the psychiatrically ill have been presented in the press, and most stridently on TV, now that the Federal laws allow direct advertising to the public. (US and New Zealand are the only nations with such allowances.) As these enthusiasms have been flaunted, realization has slowly dawned that the new pills are less effective than promised, and that their systemic risks and for suicide are much higher than publicly acknowledged. Devastating damage has been done to children, those incapacitated by depression, autism, and psychosis. How did this come about?
In the past four decades, the evaluation of new pills has been taken over by the pharmaceutical industry. Their marketing divisions have hired academic leaders to lend their names to studies produced and written by hired hands. The consequences have been severe. Healy and his co-authors tell the story of failed studies, misled governmental agencies, and legal cases describing suicides and unnecessary medical deaths.
It was not always so. Magical antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs were discovered by clinicians in the 1950s. The studies were done by doctors treating their own patients, in hospitals and clinics. The Federal Government supported independent studies under an NIMH Early Clinical Drug Evaluation program. I was a grantee. Not only did I and my colleagues study the behavioral, mental and systemic effects of each new agent, we measured cardiac and brain physiology (the latter by quantitative electroencephalography), developed effective clinical treatment protocols and dosage ranges, identified ineffective agents proposed by industry pharmacologists studying the effects in animals – the belief that effects of pills in patients could be predicted in animal studies has repeatedly been disproven, but is still often flaunted.
As a consequence of the costs of the Vietnam Wars, NIMH cancelled the ECDEU program in the 1980s, and independent academic assessments became financially dependent on funding by the industry. Ineffective treatments with high systemic risks for obesity, diabetes, cardiac, and neurologic illness, and for suicide were approved by the FDA. The story is depressing and tragic, one of many similar tales that have appeared in the past two decades. Clinicians have the skills to assess new treatments, but their independence and financial support must be assured by independent non-industry sources. Children of the Cure is a frightening and tragic story that warrants governmental and public attention.
Max Fink, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology Emeritus
StonyBrook University College of Medicine
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