Mental disorders are very serious ailments, and the prevalence of true positives is high enough to warrant a lot of funding into research and intervention.

However, there is agreement among a lot of scientists and clinicians that there is a shocking amount of false positives, people who are overdiagnosed and receive treatment nonetheless. It is also agreed that pharmaceutical companies are not innocent when it comes to creating demands for new drugs.

Now, I know very little about bipolar disorders, but the following paper by Dr Healy makes a lot of sense to me:
Healy, D. (2006). The latest mania: selling bipolar disorder. PLoS medicine, 3(4), e185. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0030185

“What might once have been thought of as sober institutions, such as Massachusetts General Hospital, have run trials of Risperdal and Zyprexa on children with a mean age of four years old [34,35]. Massachusetts General Hospital in fact recruited trial participants by running its own television adverts featuring clinicians and parents alerting parents to the fact that diffi cult and aggressive behavior in children aged four and up might stem from bipolar disorder.”

See also: articles I wrote on drug fraud in the last 3 months (1, 2, 3).

(thank you for pusblishing open access, Dr Healy!)

I’m a bit in a hurry, so I’ll just link to this:

“In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department’s secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday. […] Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames. […] Dozens of members of Congress have asked the Justice Department to investigate the NYPD. Attorney General Eric Holder has said he was disturbed by the reports. But John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, has said he is confident the NYPD’s activities are lawful and have kept the city safe.”

Yes, Mr Brennan. The safest city is the city in which all citizens are locked up in their basements, alone, guarded by military personell. Sleeping. There is so much less probability of running into danger if you’re unconscious, after all.

I am sure this would be a lovely world to live in.

–– Source: Associated Press

(More about this: see “Surveillance” on this blog).

This is the third case (#1; #2) in two months in which a major US pharmaceutical company is proven to have been involved in outrageous illegal activities over many years.

Admittedly, the two other cases were much worse. But shouldn’t we start doing something about this? Because – once again – the “fine” Pfizer has to pay is ridiculously low, compared to the benefit they gained from these activities. And, once again, the company pays some money and the perpetrators are not prosecuted.

PEOPLE did illegal things. Could we like, prosecute them, or something? Maybe put them in jail? You know, things we do if other people commit crimes?

Just a few days ago I wrote about the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. They agreed to pay $520 million to settle a federal civil lawsuit in which the company was accused of illegally promoting its antipsychotic drug quetiapine, marketed under the brand name Seroquel, for unapproved indications.

Yesterday, GlaxoSmithKline pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal charges. They agreed to pay $3 billion to settle what government officials on Monday described as “the largest case of healthcare fraud in U.S. history”.

What had happened?

“GSK targeted the antidepressant Paxil to patients under age 18 when it was approved for adults only, and it pushed the drug Wellbutrin for uses it was not approved for, including weight loss and treatment of sexual dysfunction, according to an investigation led by the U.S. Justice Department.
The company went to extreme lengths to promote the drugs, such as distributing a misleading medical journal article and providing doctors with meals and spa treatments that amounted to illegal kickbacks, prosecutors said.
In a third instance, GSK failed to give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration safety data about its diabetes drug Avandia, in violation of U.S. law, prosecutors said.
The misconduct continued for years beginning in the late 1990s and continued, in the case of Avandia’s safety data, through 2007.”
–– Source: finance.yahoo.com

People at GlaxoSmithKline made these decisions. They knew what they were doing. They decided to actively poison tens of thousands of people with drugs that were not approved for their condition – including children. And we’re we are not talking about vitamin-C pills, we’re talking about drugs that seriously affect the neurotransmitter systems in your brain, causing severe side effects in some patients.

I don’t understand how it is possible that no one goes to jail for that. Who cares if the company has to pay billions in compensation? As long as there are no consequences for the people who made the decisions, nothing will ever change.

Maybe the system does not work anymore? I don’t know. What I do know is that Western Civilization TM has watched companies screwing with the lives of millions, without interfering. Because they pay our politicians, most likely. And because people don’t pay attention, and don’t seem to care. Maybe because they don’t understand.

In any case, there is yet another case of a pharmaceutical company paying a large amount of money to avoid a sentence in court.

“AstraZeneca has agreed to pay $520 million to settle a federal civil lawsuit in which the company was accused of illegally promoting its antipsychotic drug quetiapine, marketed under the brand name Seroquel, for unapproved indications.”
– Source: psychiatryonline.org

Think about that for a second: a company pays over half a billion dollars to settle a lawsuit. That’s that then. They committed a crime against humanity. They actively and on purpose poisoned many thousand people (I can’t find numbers, but probably many more than many thousand – Seroquel is a very common drug), just for the money. And now they pay a ridiculous sum – ridiculously high for us, ridiculously nothing for them – to make “up” for it. How can you make up for such a thing?

AstraZeneca promoted a drug for conditions it had not been tested on, and (much worse) without any proof that it might actually do any good, and (worst) without any proof that it would not do harm. It is like promoting antibiotics for concentration problems, or suicidal thoughts – just much worse.

“Federal prosecutors alleged that from 2001 through 2006 AstraZeneca promoted quetiapine for treating unapproved conditions, including aggression, agitation, dementia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and insomnia.
[…]
In the settlement of the federal suit, AstraZeneca denied any wrongdoing. The company continues to face more than 10,000 civil suits filed by individuals alleging personal injuries, primarily development of diabetes, due to taking quetiapine.

There have been many of these cases before. We really need to start doing something about this.

Last fall, Pfizer paid a record $2.3 billion to settle cases involving illegal promotions of four drugs, including ziprasidone (Geodon) and pregabalin (Lyrica) (Psychiatric News, October 2, 2009). Previous cases involving off-label promotions included ones against Eli Lilly for marketing olanzapine (Zyprexa), BristolMyers Squibb for marketing aripiprazole (Abilify), and Cephalon for marketing modafinil (Provigil).

It is safe to assume that Lamarck wasn’t all that wrong, after all. We know that epigenetic processes not only do exist, but we also have gathered very convincing evidence in the last five years or so that parts of our epigenomes are transmitted to subsequent generations. Screwing with our brains might mean screwing with the brains of our unborn children. That is what you do when you eat shitty food all your life as well, by the way. Or it might be.

So what is happening here is not only a crime against the people who are affected by this, but also very likely a crime against future generations of unborn children. Most leading psychiatrists agree that we don’t know what these drugs are doing, exactly.

That does not mean we shouldn’t use drugs like Seroquel or Prozac, at all. But we have to study the effects much better, and be more careful who gets a prescription.

The largest study ever conducted on antidepressants – STAR*D, the results are available online – found that in a trial of over 5.000 depressed patients, in stage 1, only about 35% of the subjects were positively affected by antidepressant treatment. Placebo level lies about 30%. Go figure.

Liechtenstein has 36.000 inhabitants – and a monarch. The political system is a bit complicated, but essentially they hold a lot of referenda, because it’s quite simple to use direct democracy with only a few people.

The Monarch, however, can overrule any referendum if he so pleases. In fact, he can also ignore anything the parliament decides, which, quite frankly, is a bit odd for a central European country in 2012. The prince also has the right to dissolve government and dismiss parliament.

Two days ago, Liechtenstein held a referendum: do we wish to curtail the monarch’s power? Nearly 80% went to the urns, and 76% voted against the proposal. They wish to keep expressing their opinion in nationwide ballots, but also want the prince to be able to overrule referenda.

It’s the silliest thing I’ve heard in a while. I could not find out yet why this referendum could have not been overruled by the prince (the news ignore that obvious paradox).

Some people argue that the ties to the royal family are very intricate within Liechtenstein, and that voting in favor of the proposal would have made a lot of people risk their jobs. I don’t find that plausible, because these people would not vote at all, instead of voting against it.

China released its 2011 Human Rights Record Report of the United States – about 12 pages with the following chapters:

1. On life, property and personal security
2. On civil and political rights
3. On economic, social and cultural rights
4. On racial discrimination4
5. On the rights of women and children
6. On US violations of human rights against other nations

I’ll quote the first and last sentences of the report:

The State Department of the United States released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011 on May 24, 2012. As in previous years, the reports are full of over-critical remarks on the human rights situation in nearly 200 countries and regions as well as distortions and accusations concerning the human rights cause in China. However, the United States turned a blind eye to its own woeful human rights situation and kept silent about it. The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011 is hereby prepared to reveal the true human rights situation of the United States to people across the world and urge the United States to face up to its own doings.

[...]

The above-mentioned facts are but a small yet illustrative enough fraction of the US’ dismal record on its human rights situation. The US’ own tarnished human rights record has made it in no condition, on a moral, political or legal basis, to act as the world’s “human rights justice,” to place itself above other countries and release the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices year after year to accuse and blame other countries. We hereby advise the US government once again to look squarely at its own grave human rights problems, to stop the unpopular practices of taking human rights as a political instrument for interference in other countries’ internal affairs, smearing other nations’ images and seeking its own strategic interests, and to cease using double standards on human rights and pursuing hegemony under the pretext of human rights.

Some of the numbers were a bit too obviously used to make the States look bad and are most likely based on type-I error inflation, but a lot of it does have some truth to it.

“The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
– H.P. Lovecraft

Economical Policy Journal has a scary article on a bill approved on Monday “that outlaws protests in instances where some government officials are nearby, whether or not you even know it.” The bill passed the Senate and only requires the signature of the President to become law.

The US government can bring charges on anyone who – accidently or not – disrupts an event attended by a person who is protected by the secret service.

It is considered to be a federal offense, and “essentially crushes whatever currently remains of the right to assemble and peacefully protest.” A peaceful protest outside a candidate’s concession speech will not be legal anymore.

“Hours after the act passed, presidential candidate Rick Santorum was granted Secret Service protection”

…