Monday, April 11, 2011

A New Smoking Gun in the APA Textbook Fiasco

A new piece of evidence has been unearthed by Phyllis Vine of MIWatch that the Nemeroff/Schatzberg textbook was indeed ghostwritten by STI, Scientific Therapeutics Information. Somehow, Vine was able to unearth STI's "portfolio" of publications, even though the company has since removed the incriminating pages.

I suppose APA might still hold to its guns, presumably by arguing that STI did no more than help to coordinate the project, perhaps by funnelling funds from SmithKlineBeacham to the American Psychiatric Press. That would be a stretch.


You can look at the suppressed web page yourself here. It is filled with the usual suspects--mostly industry funded supplements of various medical journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, the preeminent producer of pseudo-CME supplements. Aside from the Nemeroff/Schatzberg book, STI also displays a book on the management of lipid disorders and a book on fungal infections.  Perhaps an enterprising reader of this blog will track down the funders and writers of those books.

This is all part of STI's portfolio. What is a "portfolio"? It is "A set of pieces of creative work collected by someone to display their skills, esp. to a potential employer." In this case, Nemeroff and Schatzberg got to not only claim the textbook as part of their own portfolios, but presumably they got paid for the honor. Niiiice.

 

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

What was the University of Miami thinking when the recruited and hired Nemeroff to be Chair of Psychiatry? Anyone have any ideas?

Neuroskeptic said...

Hmm, this is interesting. Taking a look through the archive of the Portfolio, on the "Multimedia" page, they list "PsychCouncil Presentation Support Materials".

Details are few but one of the pics shows a CD labelled "Fall 2001 Slides".

A Google search reveals that the word "PsychCouncil" exists only in one place: the GSK internal documents relating to Charles Nemeroff, namely these: dida.library.ucsf.edu/pdf/oxx10h10

So this is not the only time that STI have "helped" Nemeroff with his work. It was nice of them to help him prepare his slides although as an expert in the field I wonder if he couldn't have done it himself? Maybe he was not very good at using PowerPoint.

Anonymous said...

The Paxil logo is evident on the cover of the PsychCouncil materials, FYI. Clearly GSK-funded.

Anonymous said...

We just posted the deposition of STI ghostwriter Sally Laden. She discusses working with the American Psychiatric Association on their conferences.

http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2011/04/american-psychiatric-association-stunned-again-with-ghostwriting-controversy.html

Asslete said...

FWIW...back in the day when I still suckled from the teat of Pharma, I was part of PsychCouncil. It was the semi-annual forum for all of the Paxil "Key Opinion Leaders" to meet and learn the latest information. Every other Pharma co had similar Councils for their products. There was no illusion that this was CME or independent...it was clearly a GSK event.