03-05-2008 Media Madness

Yesterday was a remarkably quiet day in the frequently noisy mental health world. Conveniently, my back went into muscles spasms and I spent most of yesterday laying flat on my back. As a result, I'll be playing catch up on some bits later today, but for now wanted to pass along some interesting things I've run into the last day or so.

Danny Carlat bangs on a stealth advertising campaign for an antipsychotic that apparently won't be approved in the US. The campaign is in the form of a "survey" about treatment problems faced by people diagnosed with schizophrenia. What's also weird about the campaign is the involvement of Mental Health America, the former National Mental Health Association. This is the second time in recent months that it's essentially gone to bat for Wyeth. Last time out was a "report" on depression. Classically, MHA has gotten about half of its monies for its main national organization from Big Pharma (so has NAMI National only with a larger budget), but has been fairly circumspect about attaching its name to such campaigns (NAMI National hasn't been as virginal). It looks like that is over and it's simply discouraging to see.

Speaking of Wyeth, CL Psych has done an awesome job of defanging a study of Effexor's efficacy in which the authors--and main journal editor--were crazy enough to claim that a teensy bit difference in efficacy in treating depression had important public health implications. That's simply out of bounds. Besides, wouldn't patients' difficult experiences withdrawing from Effexor count as a public health problem, or do public health opinionators only care about certain kinds of addiction?

Charles Barber, author of Comfortably Numb, hosts a conversation concerning his book on washingtonpost.com and defends himself against a reviewer in the main paper who apparently thought that psychological treatments Barber enthused about in his book were unresearched. That's just silly, since there is a fairly strong evidence base for CBT, for example, at this point, while the evidence base for anti-depressants is among the most corrupted evidence bases I can think of in all of medicine. I would defend Barber's work a bit more aggressively but his publisher has still not sent me a review copy of the book. Proving once again what a nobody I am in the media game these days.

Speaking of the media game, yet another "memoir" author has been busted over publishing a fake account of their "life." I'm sure she got a nice advance, too. It just disgusts me that in a media world where many decent, honest sorts have been driven out of their jobs in recent years (myself included), people somehow get paying gigs by committing lies to paper. All I can do is cry, as the song goes.

I'll be back with more later, assuming my back cooperates.