Samizdat Health Writers

A writers collective

Books

A Bad Penny

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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.

Shipwreck of the Singular: Rescued

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by David Healy

Shipwreck of the Singular took more time to write than all my other books combined. The others tumbled out – often in just a few weeks.

Unpublishable?

Pharmageddon took 3 weeks. But it then took 4 years to find a publisher. I took on an agent to help get a publisher. Faced with Shipwreck, the same agent said it would never be published. She didn’t know why. She didn’t want to waste her time finding out. This made it clear to me the publishing world was changing just like everything else was.  It led to Samizdat, which is part and parcel of Shipwreck.

It’s the forgotten, the disenfranchised who might buy into ‘Rescue’. Those who control our health, economic and publishing systems won’t.

Antidepressants, Suicide and Violence

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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

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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.

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

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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.

This Novel Will Swallow You Whole

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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.”

Malcharist: A Novel

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Buy: Malcharist

A novel by Paul John Scott

A closely-observed, panoramic thriller about medical science gone wrong, and the people who make dangerous pills seem safe.

It’s Manhattan in the winter of 2010, and Shivani Patel is carrying the secrets of a trade that no one understands: medical ghostwriting. A Cambridge-trained scientist and wordsmith for the world’s largest drugmaker, she makes her soaring pay by delivering the sleight-of-hand needed to move new drugs into journals and onto market. Then she watches as a parade of aging males take credit for her work…

The Hemingway Effect – Malcharist

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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 […]

A Cure for Fraudulent Reporting

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Children of the Cure is first a deep dive into the fraudulent reporting of “Study 329,” the clinical trial of Paxil (paroxetine) that launched an epidemic of drug-induced suicides by children and adolescents in the United States and many other countries.  It is an indictment of Paxil’s manufacturer, Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) and the many doctors who were paid to have their names appear on a study that was ghost-written by GSK.  A review by Jim Gottstein, author of The Zyprexa Papers

“Paxil turned me into a monster”

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“I tried killing myself thirty times.” So says Vickie, a nurse from Philadelphia who was first prescribed Paxil at the age of ten for something called “social anxiety disorder.” For the past several years, I have borne witness to people like Vickie – wonderful, creative, caring people – who were turned into burned-out shells of their former selves after getting hooked on antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs. Most of these people began taking these drugs for the most banal reasons you could imagine… By Patrick D Hahn @Patrickhahn