A Nice Award, And A Peabody Award Questioned

Last week, PsychCentral.com's John Grohol handed out some journalism awards for writing on mental health issues online, driven by recent media awards from Mental Health America which completely ignored the online world. Freelancers Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer won for a Slate.com article on conflicts around "The Infinite Mind" radio show; the New York Times for its "Patients' Voices" series; Danny Carlat won for being Danny Carlat; CL Psych won for being CL Psych; Jeremy Dean at PsyBlog won for writing about limited research behind so-called brain training programs; The Last Psychiatrist won for being The Last Psychiatrist; Vaughan Bell at MindHacks.com won for disemboweling fMRI claims; and, "Like him or hate him (he tends to be polarizing)," yours truly won for thumping out this blog and offering the public court documents and so on.

I certainly appreciate the hat tip, particularly as this year marks the first time since 1999 that I have not won a print journalism award of some kind. That's mostly due to the fact that the freelance market has melted down--a publication I wrote for on occasion told me last week that they have no more freelance money for at least the rest of the year, which is simply stunning--which means I don't get to do much print work these days. Sadly.

More importantly, a PBS documentary "Depression: Out Of The Shadows" recently won a Peabody Award (one of the biggies in TV journalism) as well as recognition from Mental Health America (see above link). But now the Columbia Journalism Review picked up on the fact that the much-discredited Emory University psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff had appeared on the program and made some spurious claims:

"Some might argue that little about this episode matters, since Nemeroff’s downfall took place in October and Depression: Out of the Shadows aired five months earlier. Yet a simple Google search would have alerted McPhee to the fact that Nemeroff, though the author of hundreds of research papers and well respected in his field, has been dogged by conflict of interest allegations for years. In 2003, he came under fire for praising three pharmaceutical products in the journal Nature Neuroscience without disclosing he held a financial stake in their success, one of which he held the patent on...."

"But what made the praise bestowed on this PBS documentary particularly troubling were the erroneous, drug-industry serving statements made by Nemeroff within the film—statements which had the potential to negatively affect public health, and which the documentary left unchallenged. During a segment on the FDA’s 2004 decision to require “black box” safety warnings stating that antidepressants can increase the risk of suicide in children and teenagers, a risk it extended in May of 2007 to users under twenty-five, Nemeroff seized the occasion to claim that the federal safety warning was mistaken."

Oh, yes. The CJR writer questions the validity of the Peabody award in regards to all of that. Personally, I don't have much taste for being a journalist questioning other journalists' awards, so I'll leave it at that. I felt the program was OK-ish and in writing about it last year ignored an appearance by Emory University's conflict of interest king Charles Nemeroff as I was simply exhausted by earlier news about the doc. I was furious about the program's pimping for ECT, however.

For what it's worth, I sure didn't set out to be polarizing when I began this blog almost four years ago and I don't try to be polarizing each day. I realize that that dynamic is out there and that I have that reputation, earned or not, and that it sometimes loses me readers and contributors. The reality is that I have taken a very firm stance that the public--the ones footing the bill for psychiatry and Big Pharma--has an absolute right to know how convoluted the game has become and who is behind the curtain and so on.

As I noted last year when I wrote about responses to my writing on David Foster Wallace's suicide, if no one pushes the intellectual envelope and if no one asks difficult questions, then nothing ever changes. And things have got to change.