This programme was brought to you in association with... - November 21, 2008
What’s more embarrassing than having a non-disclosing psychiatrist like Charles Nemeroff (you can read about him in this Nature editorial) on your university’s staff, regularly raking in six-figure sums from pharmaceutical companies and failing to disclose the fact? Possibly, having such a psychiatrist as the star host of your highly popular radio programme.
National Public Radio, the darling of the US intellectual elite, may be discovering that today, after the New York Times reported that Frederick K. Goodwin, the host of NPR’s award-winning weekly programme, “The Infinite Mind,” didn’t tell the station – or, needless to say, his radio audience – about at least $1.3 million he earned between 2000 and 2007 giving marketing lectures for drug companies.
Just in case you might think there’s no connection, consider this from the Times:
In a program broadcast on Sept. 20, 2005, Dr. Goodwin warned that children with biploar disorder who are left untreated could suffer brain damage, a controversial view. “But as we’ll be hearing today,” Dr. Goodwin reassured his audience, “modern treatments — mood stabilizers in particular — have been proven both safe and effective in bipolar children.”That very day, GlaxoSmithKline paid Dr. Goodwin $2,500 to give a promotional lecture for its mood stabilizer drug, Lamictal, at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Fla. Indeed, Glaxo paid Dr. Goodwin more than $329,000 that year for promoting Lamictal, records given Congressional investigators show.
And just who are these “Congressional investigators?” No surprises here: It’s Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who for over a year has been leading an investigation rooting out academic researchers with undisclosed industry ties. (See Nature news stories here and here.)
NPR has yanked the show off the air, effective immediately. Its vice president, Margaret Low Smith, says the network never would have aired the programme—which receives major underwriting from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health – had it known of Goodwin’s financial interests.
Goodwin, a former chief of the National Institute of Mental Health, told the Times that he is on the payroll of so many companies – according to The Times, in one 2003 paper he reported consulting or speaking for nine of them -- that bias in favor of any single one is not a risk: “These companies compete with each other and cancel each other out.”
How’s that for reassuring?
Comments
This is quite unfair to all of the civic-minded psychiatrists working to medicalize aberrant behaviors. If these professionals are not allowed to do their work unaided by the emoluments of the drug industry, they must return to the tools of yesteryear: the ice bath, the tranquilizing chair, and the lobotomy. After new mental illness are invented and added to the DSM, they must be treated with something, mustn't they?
The psychiatry-pharma relationship has allowed society's unwanted to be controlled in ways that are less offensive to the sensibilities. For doing society's dirtiest work psychiatrists should be rewarded handsomely. The rest of us, who expect the doctors to make annoying people behave better, are hardly in a position to nit-pick the means by which they are rewarded.
This tempest in a teapot is surely the handiwork of old-school critics, like Thomas Szasz, who still insist, despite the unpopularity of their views, that psychiatry should be held to the same scientific standards as other medical specialties, and even more absurdly, that psychiatric patients have rights.
Posted by: Nicolas Martin | November 22, 2008 02:39 PM
http://www.npr.org/about/press/2008/112108.InfiniteMind.html
The host and the show is not that closely tied to NPR.
Posted by: Not So Fast | November 23, 2008 04:15 AM
"These companies compete with each other and cancel each other out".
Yes, it is like saying: "so many companies bribe me that it does not make a difference, forget the fact that I am a prostitute in the fist place"...
NPR is no more what it used to be. It steadily declined during the last couple of years. Hard to believe that no NPR official was unaware of his biased view.
Posted by: DD123 | November 23, 2008 10:18 PM
Except meds given when they are not necessary,can be lethal.Such as the metabolic syndrome.Diabetes 2,diseases of the pancreas...
We don't need "stars".
Posted by: jeanX | November 28, 2008 02:51 AM