Allen Jones, gained widespread attention as a 'whistleblower' after discovering that state employees were receiving kickbacks from the pharmaceutical industry in Texas while working as an investigator in the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General (OIG). According to several sources he discovered similar issues in Pennsylvania as well, but when investigating the Department of Welfare he was told to back down, and that the pharmaceutical industry "write checks to both sides of the aisle." " [1] [2] [3]
David HealyFRCPsych, a professor of psychiatry at Bangor University in the United Kingdom, is a psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist, scientist and author. His main areas of research are the contribution of antidepressants to suicide, conflict of interest between pharmaceutical companies and academic medicine, and the history of pharmacology. Healy has written more than 150 peer-reviewed articles, 200 other articles, and 20 books, including The Antidepressant Era, The Creation of Psychopharmacology, The Psychopharmacologists Volumes 1–3, Let Them Eat Prozac and Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder.
David Southall is a retired British paediatrician who specialised in international maternal and child hospital healthcare and in child protection. He worked in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993-1995, for which he received an OBE in 1999. In 1995 he set up the charity Maternal and Childhealth Advocacy International (MCAI), of which he remains a trustee as of 2023. His child protection work and research into Munchausen syndrome by proxy attracted controversy and led to conflict with the General Medical Council.
Derek Summerfield is an honorary senior lecturer at London's Institute of Psychiatry and a member of the Executive Committee of Transcultural Special Interest Group at the Royal College of Psychiatry. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Egyptian Psychiatric Association. He has published around 150 papers and has made other contributions in medical and social sciences literature.
The New Freedom Commission on Mental Health was established by U.S. President George W. Bush through Executive Order 13263 on April 29, 2002 to conduct a comprehensive study of the U.S. mental health service delivery system and make recommendations based on its findings. The commission has been touted as part of his commitment to eliminate inequality for Americans with disabilities.
Nalidixic acid is the first of the synthetic quinolone antibiotics.
Clinical trials publication is having research published in a peer reviewed journal following clinical trials. Most investigators will want to have such a publication but the nature of clinical trials may create special considerations and obstacles.
Paul D. Thacker is an American journalist who reports on science, medicine, and the environment. He was a lead investigator of the United States Senate Committee on Finance for Senator Chuck Grassley, where he examined financial links between physicians and pharmaceutical companies.
Nancy Fern Olivieri is a prominent Toronto haematologist and researcher with an interest in the treatment of haemoglobinopathies. She is best known for a protracted struggle with the Hospital for Sick Children and the pharmaceutical company Apotex about the drug deferiprone.
Loren Richard Mosher was an American psychiatrist, clinical professor of psychiatry, expert on schizophrenia and the chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia in the National Institute of Mental Health (1968–1980). Mosher spent his professional career advocating for humane and effective treatment for people diagnosed as having schizophrenia and was instrumental in developing an innovative, residential, home-like, non-hospital, non-drug treatment model for newly identified acutely psychotic persons.
Schizophrenia Bulletin is a peer-reviewed medical journal which covers research relating to the etiology and treatment of schizophrenia. The journal is published bimonthly by Oxford University Press in association with the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and Schizophrenia International Research Society.
Peter Christian Gøtzsche is a Danish physician, medical researcher, and former leader of the Nordic Cochrane Center at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration and has written numerous reviews for the organization. His membership in Cochrane was terminated by its Governing Board of Trustees on 25 September 2018. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gøtzsche was criticised for spreading disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
David Franklin is an American microbiologist and former fellow of Harvard Medical School who while employed by Parke-Davis filed the 1996 whistleblower lawsuit exposing their illegal promotion of Neurontin (gabapentin) for off-label uses. Franklin's suit, filed on behalf of the citizens of the United States under the qui tam provisions of US federal and state law, uncovered illegal pharmaceutical industry practices and created new legal precedent that resulted in a cascade of criminal convictions and civil and criminal penalties against Pfizer and several other pharmaceutical companies totalling more than $7 billion. Civil cases also followed Franklin v. Parke-Davis. Insurance companies, led by Kaiser Permanente, sued Pfizer for fraud and violation of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act; the Kaiser case settled in April 2014 after Pfizer's appeal at the US Supreme Court was rejected. Franklin v. Pfizer also spawned more than a thousand wrongful death (suicide) suits associated with use of Neurontin. Numerous books have addressed the social, economic and healthcare implications of Dr. Franklin's stance and actions. The settlement was the first off-label promotion settlement under the False Claims Act.
The Critical Psychiatry Network (CPN) is a psychiatric organization based in the United Kingdom. It was created by a group of British psychiatrists who met in Bradford, England in January 1999 in response to proposals by the British government to amend the Mental Health Act 1983. They expressed concern about the implications of the proposed changes for human rights and the civil liberties of people with mental health illness. Most people associated with the group are practicing consultant psychiatrists in the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS), among them Dr Joanna Moncrieff. A number of non-consultant grade and trainee psychiatrists are also involved in the network.
Sir Simon Charles Wessely is a British psychiatrist. He is Regius Professor of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London and head of its department of psychological medicine, vice dean for academic psychiatry, teaching and training at the Institute of Psychiatry, as well as Director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research. He is also honorary consultant psychiatrist at King's College Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital, as well as civilian consultant advisor in psychiatry to the British Army. He was knighted in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to military healthcare and to psychological medicine. From 2014 to 2017, he was the elected president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and then became the first psychiatrist to be elected as President of the Royal Society of Medicine in 200 years.
Alessandro Liberati was an Italian healthcare researcher and clinical epidemiologist, and founder of the Italian Cochrane Centre.
The relationship between antidepressant use and suicide risk is a subject of medical research and has faced varying levels of debate. This problem was thought to be serious enough to warrant intervention by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to label greater likelihood of suicide as a risk of using antidepressants. Some studies have shown that the use of certain antidepressants correlate with an increased risk of suicide in some patients relative to other antidepressants. However, these conclusions have faced considerable scrutiny and disagreement: A multinational European study indicated that antidepressants decrease risk of suicide at the population level, and other reviews of antidepressant use claim that there is not enough data to indicate antidepressant use increases risk of suicide.
Study 329 was a clinical trial which was conducted in North America from 1994 to 1998 to study the efficacy of paroxetine, an SSRI anti-depressant, in treating 12- to 18-year-olds diagnosed with major depressive disorder. Led by Martin Keller, then professor of psychiatry at Brown University, and funded by the British pharmaceutical company SmithKline Beecham—known since 2000 as GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)—the study compared paroxetine with imipramine, a tricyclic antidepressant, and placebo. SmithKline Beecham had released paroxetine in 1991, marketing it as Paxil in North America and Seroxat in the UK. The drug attracted sales of $11.7 billion in the United States alone from 1997 to 2006, including $2.12 billion in 2002, the year before it lost its patent.
Psychiatry is, and has historically been, viewed as controversial by those under its care, as well as sociologists and psychiatrists themselves. There are a variety of reasons cited for this controversy, including the subjectivity of diagnosis, the use of diagnosis and treatment for social and political control including detaining citizens and treating them without consent, the side effects of treatments such as electroconvulsive therapy, antipsychotics and historical procedures like the lobotomy and other forms of psychosurgery or insulin shock therapy, and the history of racism within the profession in the United States.
Joseph Gavin Collier is a British retired clinical pharmacologist and emeritus professor of medicines policy at St George's Hospital and Medical School in London, whose early research included establishing the effect of aspirin on human prostaglandins and looking at the role of nitric oxide and angiotensin converting enzyme in controlling blood vessel tone and blood pressure. Later, in his national policy work, he helped change the way drugs are priced and bought by the NHS, and ensured that members of governmental advisory committees published their conflicts of interest.
Steven Stack is an American sociologist and professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Wayne State University, where he is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Neuroscience.