Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Welcome to MIA Reports, showcasing our independent and original journalism devoted to rethinking psychiatry. We take selected MIA Reports and provide them as audio articles. Click here for the text version of this and all of our MIA reports.

The Whistleblower and Penn: A Final Accounting of Study 352

Written by Peter Simons, read by James Moore, first published on Mad in America, December 29, 2019.

Although the general story of ghostwriting in trials of psychiatric drugs is now pretty well known, the details of the corruption in specific trials are still emerging into the public record, often a decade or more after the original sin of fraudulent publication. The latest study to finally see the full light of day is GlaxoSmithKline’s study 352.

Perhaps the most infamous ghostwritten study is GSK’s study 329, which, in a 2001 report published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, falsely touted paroxetine (Paxil) as an effective treatment for adolescent depression. The company paid over $3 billion in penalties for fraud.

That same year, study 352 made its first appearance in the research literature. That was when Charles Nemeroff, who in the years ahead would become the public face of research misconduct, “authored” an article on the efficacy of paroxetine for bipolar disorder. It has taken 18 years for the full story of that corruption to become known, the final chapter recently emerging when a large cache of study 352 documents—emails, memos, and other internal correspondence between the key players—was made public.

The documents reveal a web of corruption that went beyond the fraud of ghostwriting into the spinning of negative results into positive conclusions, and the abetting of that corruption by an editor of the scientific journal that published the article. The documents also reveal a whitewashing of the corruption by the University of Pennsylvania.

However, it was the publication of these documents that provided Jay Amsterdam, an investigator in the trial who turned whistleblower after he smelled a rat, with a chance to say “case closed.” Amsterdam and Leemon McHenry have now published two articles that provide a step-by-step deconstruction of the study—the ghostwriting, the spinning of results, the betrayal of public trust.

Here is the story of that whistleblowing.

This week, we interview journalist and author Johann Hari.

Johann is one of our foremost social science thinkers and writers. In addition to writing regularly for the New York Times and Independent newspapers, he has written extensively on social science and human rights issues. His 2015 book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, challenges what we believe about addiction and his TED talk on our response to addiction has been viewed over 20 million times.

Johann was twice named ‘National Newspaper Journalist of the Year’ by Amnesty International. And he has been named ‘Cultural Commentator of the Year’ and ‘Environmental Commentator of the Year’ at the Comment Awards.

In this interview, we talk about Johann’s latest book, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions, which has been called a ‘game changer’ and received plaudits for its explanation of the social and cultural issues leading to depression and anxiety.

In the episode we discuss:

• How Johann became interested in journalism and began writing about social justice and human rights issues.
• What led to wanting to write a book that was partly based on his own experiences with depression and anxiety, but also that provided the evidence for social and cultural issues that may underlie the dramatic increase in the number of people needing support for emotional distress.
• The facts behind the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness.
• The role of the bio-psycho-social model of mental distress and why we may have focussed predominantly on biological interventions.
• Social prescribing as a means to enable connection between people who struggle with depression and anxiety.
• The Hamilton Depression scale and how it shows us that the effect of antidepressant drugs is small when compared to the improvements that can be achieved without drug therapy.
• How Johann would like to widen the definition of what may be considered an ‘antidepressant’.
• How disempowerment often lies at the heart of poor health.
• How stigma relates to our perceptions of an individual who is labelled mentally ill and how it changes if we think someone has a biological problem.
• Johann’s experiences in the Berlin district of Kotti.
• That people can hear audio of the many of the interviews held for the book at https://thelostconnections.com

Relevant links:

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions

Johaan Hari talk at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce (RSA)

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

TED Talk, Everything you think you know about addition is wrong

To get in touch with us email: [email protected]

© Mad in America 2018

This week on MIA Radio, we interview Kelli Foulkrod. Kelli is the owner of the Organic Mental Health Center. She is a therapist, yoga teacher, and mental health paradigm shifter based in Austin, Texas. For the past 15 years, Kelli has worked in the mental health field and practised yoga. She has been integrating yoga and the healing arts into traditional psychotherapy for over eight years and is passionate about offering holistic mental health treatment options.

With many years experience in an academic research setting, Kelli bridges the gap between science and spirituality. Kelli has experience serving clients populations of pregnant and postpartum women, grief and loss, psychosis, homelessness, substance abuse, teens, couples, and groups. She offers individual, couples, and group psychotherapy services in addition to yoga therapy sessions, workshops, and retreats.

In the episode we discuss:

How Kelli started her journey as a psychology undergraduate at the University of Texas and working in clinical and academic research.

How working in a neuroscience laboratory resulted in internal conflict and led Kelli to interest in and research into alternative modalities alongside her psychology studies.

How Kelli experienced first hand the approaches that pharmaceutical manufacturers used when running clinical trials.

That Kelli felt that modern psychology neglects the body and she started to practise yoga and meditation alongside studying for her masters degree in clinical psychology.

That, to Kelli, modern mental health therapy feels egotistical and narcissistic and that she was resistant to becoming a clinical therapist.

How people are hungry for alternatives but there are so few other options that people continue to get involved with mainstream medicine.

The profound changes that occur when becoming parents and why this might lead to mental health difficulties.

How we have lost touch with community and social connections that existed when we lived as tribal cultures.

How shamanic ceremony and tradition can be understood and utilised in response to emotional distress.

Relevant links:

The Organic Mental Health Centre

The Organic Mental Health Centre (Facebook)

Yoga for depression - the research

To get in touch with us email: [email protected]

© Mad in America 2018

This week is a special one for us at Mad in America, as it’s the 200th episode of our podcast. Our first interview was with attorney and author of Zyprexa Papers, Jim Gottstein, back in July 2017. For this and the next podcast, we’ll be talking to the people that make Mad in America what it is, the people behind the scenes, who keep it running day-to-day.

Later in this podcast, we will hear from staff reporter Amy Biancolli, science news editor Justin Karter and arts editor Karin Jervert, but to kick us off today, we hear from Mad in America founder, Robert Whitaker.

Bob worked as a newspaper reporter for a number of years, covering medicine and science. He is the author of five books, three of which investigate the history of psychiatry and the merits of its treatments. Those books are Mad in America,published in 2002; Anatomy of an Epidemic, from 2010, and he was co-author along with Lisa Cosgrove of Psychiatry Under the Influence, published in 2015.

He was also a director of publications at Harvard Medical School for a time during the 1990s.

Bob joined me to talk about how Mad in America got started and how it strives to achieve its aim of rethinking psychiatry.

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Audrey Clare Farley is a writer, editor, and scholar of 20th-century American culture with a special interest in science and religion. She earned a PhD in English literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. She now teaches a course on U.S. history at Mount St. Mary’s University.

Her first book, The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt, tells the story of a 1930s millionairess whose mother secretly sterilized her to deprive her of the family fortune, sparking a sensational case and forcing a debate of eugenics. Her second book, which we will be discussing today, Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America, explores the lives of the four women behind the National Institute of Mental Health’s famous case study of schizophrenia. It was named a New York Times Editors’ Pick and will be the focus of our conversation today.

Audrey’s essays have appeared in the Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, and many other outlets. She lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania.

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Thank you for being with us to listen to the podcast and read our articles this year. MIA is funded entirely by reader donations. If you value MIA, please help us continue to survive and grow.

Mad in America podcasts and reports are made possible, in part, by a grant from the Thomas Jobe Fund.

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