Eli Lilly Grants Millions To American Psychiatric Association, Johns Hopkins, Advocacy Groups and Medscape

A few months ago, I rolled out Eli Lilly's grants to various advocacy groups, universities, continuing medical education companies and whatnot for the first quarter of 2008. Some of the big grantees were Harvard and the American Psychiatric Association. The numbers are now out for the second quarter, an ongoign effort by Lilly to blunt criticism of its donations to various groups--they can now claim they are all transparent--that work hand-in-glove with the pharma giant to get lots of Americans diagnosed with mental disorder and sell lots of psych meds. The grants are also for diabetes and cancer work, but we're mostly interested in mental health--or neuroscience, as Lilly calls it--here.

Once again, the APA raked in big dough from Lilly: $623,188. Add that to the $623,190 the group got from Lilly in the first quarter and that comes to a very cool $1,246,378 for the first six months of the year (and that doesn't count ads in the APA journals). The APA affiliated American Psychiatric Foundation took in $272,634. The APA is being investigated by Sen. Charles Grassley for its intimate relationship with Big Pharma.

The US Psychiatric and Mental Health Congress was no slouch either with $476,250 to show for its grantwriting efforts. The American Academy for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry didn't go away empty-handed either: it got $123,000, including $25,000 for a program called "Early Onset Bipolar Disorder: What Those in the Know, Know."

Among advocacy groups, NAMI and Mental Health America (the old NMHA) were big winners. NAMI National took in $490,000 while local and state affiliates took in so many individual contributions that I didn't even bother to add them up. MHA National got $635,000 from Lilly.

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine was the leader amongst universities this time out, taking in $392,317. No money for Harvard this time, but there were lots of smaller contributions to other universities including the University of Washington's psychiatry department which got $5,000 to do a grand rounds on "Bipolar Depression: Controversies and Challenges." Nice to see Lilly's money at work right down the street from me.

And then there were the CME companies, taking in so much I couldn't make myself run the calculator that long. I will note that the controversial Medscape took in $87,500.

Word has it that pharma companies like Pfizer, AstraZeneca and such will soon be disclosing their own contributions to groups like these on a regular basis. I cannot wait.