[jinx]

Prescribing the prescribed drugs?

But there is concern in the US that drug companies have been influencing psychiatrists over what anti-psychotic drugs to prescribe.

Whitaker pointed to academic studies in Vermont and Illinois as evidence that too many schizophrenia patients are kept on medication for too long.
In the Vermont case, patients discharged in the 1950s and 1960s were studied 30 years on.
Dr Courtenay Harding determined that one-third had completely recovered and all of those ex-patients had stopped taking anti-psychotic drugs.
"You need a paradigm of care which recognises that some percentage of patients would do better off medication and that should be built into the system," Whitaker concluded.
Suggesting the journalist was "cherry-picking" academic studies, Meltzer warned against making generalisations based on the Harding study "because there was no evidence that these people needed medication to begin with".





• In July of last year, Senator Charles Grassley demanded clarity over the finances of the American Psychiatric Association (APA)
• The US Department of Health and Human Services is investigating payments to the former head of Emory University's psychiatry department, Charles Nemeroff
• Harvard University is conducting an internal investigation into psychiatry professor Joseph Biederman, who is accused of failing to disclose payments from drug companies in full
Robert Whitaker suggests the American public is "losing faith in psychiatry as an honest profession".