In the 1950s, estimates of the incidence of depression were fifty people per million; today the estimate is 100,000 per million. What was once defined as “anxiety” and treated with tranquilizers in the wake of the crisis of benzodiazipine dependence and the development of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors became “depression.” And as SSRIs have been shown to be effective for treating other nervous conditions, such as panic disorder, estimates of their frequency have increased markedly as well. Disease increasingly means whatever (...) we have a reimbursable treatment for. (shrink)

When the University of Toronto withdrew a contract it held with me in December 2000, it initiated a sequence of events that led to a public letter to the University from senior figures in the world psychopharmacology community protesting against the infringement of academic freedom involved and a first ever legal action, undertaked by this author, seeking redress for a violation of academic freedom. The issues of academic freedom surrounding this case have been intertwined with a debate about the possibility (...) that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) group of antidepressants have the potential to trigger suicidality in a subgroup of patients. Whether the SSRIs do trigger suicidality or not, exploration of this issue has given rise to a number of worrying sets of observations. First, in my view, there is evidence that pharmaceutical companies have miscoded raw data on suicidal acts and suicidal ideation. Second, this author also maintains that there is a growing body of examples of ghostwriting of articles in the therapeutics domain. Many of the tensions evident in this case, therefore, can be linked to company abilities to keep clinical trial data out of the public domain — this is the point at which the pharmaceutical python gets a grip on academia. (shrink)

The systematic funding of University research has brought into relief a question of conflicting interests. The potential in funded research for conflict and the damaging effects that conflicting interests might have on civil society had been first noted by Eisenhower in the context of State-funded research. Since the 1980s, there has been greater concern with the corrosive effects of private or corporate funding on research. Initial efforts to manage the problems have focused on authorship declarations, but recent controversies with the (...) SSRIs suggest the only way to manage the problem is by placing all clinical trial data in the public domain. (shrink)

It's sold as happiness in a blister pack - a cure-all that has changed the way we think about wellbeing. As Prozac reaches its 20th birthday, Anna Moore presents 20 things you need to know about the most widely used antidepressant in the world.

First ever English Translation of Philippe PInel's 2nd Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation. The founder of French psychiatry wrote Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation in 1800 and reworked it nine years later. This book is the "Entirely Reworked and Extensively Expanded" version from 1809. Today, it can give historians of medicine and psychiatrists an overview of mental illnesses as they were viewed in that era. The author, Philippe Pinel, became known as the doctor who worked to free the insane from (...) chains. (shrink)