The Psychiatrist Who Popped The Anti-Depressant Bubble

Many of you know that a paper appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in January asserting that pharma companies had covered up negative clinical trials results of anti-depressants for decades by simply not publishing the negative trials. This allowed the companies to overstate the efficacy of the drugs by about 31 percent and the paper established that anti-depressants don't work nearly as well as anyone thought, at least in the mainstream world, or wished. In other words, the evidence base supporting the use of anti-depressants is deeply flawed, much more so than almost anyone previously admitted publicly.

The paper, authored by Erick Turner of OHSU, got tons of press attention and I knew there had to be an interesting story behind how the paper came to be and the doctor who wrote it.

Today, a long article of mine on Turner and the NEJM paper was published in Willamette Week, the Pulitzer-winning alt-weekly in Portland, Ore., where I was the city hall reporter once upon a time. You can read it here.

Several interesting things popped up in the course of my reporting. One is that Turner himself was once a paid speaker for Eli Lilly and Bristol Myers-Squibb and, in fact, went to work on collecting data for the NEJM paper soon after breaking off his relationship with those companies in 2005. Two is that almost no one in the psych world I interviewed for the story offered much in the way of a ringing defense of anti-depressants. Turner himself, in a line that got cut from the final version of my piece, admitted that using anti-depressants in treating bipolar disorder scared him. Even Peter Kramer, as staunch a defender of anti-depressants as there is, allowed that Turner's paper was damaging to the reputation of anti-depressants. And so on.

Anyway, I thought I'd make readers aware of the article, which I hope some of you find a worthwhile read. BTW, I have a hunch that we'll hear more from Turner in the future.