Scientific Misconduct and Fraud: The Final Nail in Psychiatry’s Antidepressant Coffin Series, P4

Shidonna Raven
6 hours ago
2 min read

By Bruce E. Levine

January 17, 2024

Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,

Thus, STAR*D investigators moved a group of subjects that they themselves had previously excluded as being non-evaluable into the evaluable patients category, knowing full well that this would dramatically inflate the remission rate. “That tells of a conscious act of scientific fraud,” reports Whitaker.

This was not STAR*D investigators’ only scientific misconduct. They also switched the primary outcome measures during the study to inflate remission rates. Additionally, STAR*D investigators had originally designated subjects who dropped out of the study to be counted as treatment failures, however, they reversed this protocol so that these dropouts were excluded from the tally, again inflating remission rates. Even with the research misconduct of violating their original protocol, STAR*D remission rates were so unimpressive that STAR*D investigators orchestrated another maneuver to further inflate remission rates: they created a “theoretical” remission rate based on the notion that if the drop-outs had stayed in the trial through all four stages of treatment, they would have remitted at the same rate as those who did stay in the trial to that end. STAR*D investigators’ assumptions about drop-outs, Pigott points out, “are not true” as they are counter to previous research.

In summary, STAR*D investigators’ protocol violations and a baseless theoretical calculation raised the cumulative remission rate to 67%—in contrast to the 35% remission rate that Pigott calculated had STAR*D researchers stuck to the original study design.

So, what could have been the motivation for the STAR*D investigators to inflate these remission rates? The two lead STAR*D investigators were psychiatrists A. John Rush and Madhukar H. Trivedi, and in the 2006 STAR*D report, at its end in small print, are the details of their financial relationships with multiple pharmaceutical companies, including the manufacturers of several of the antidepressants used in STAR*D, such as Forest Pharmaceuticals (Celexa), Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories (Effexor), GlaxoSmithKline (Wellbutrin), and Pfizer (Zoloft). Also detailed are the financial relationships of several other STAR*D investigators with drug companies.

Ironically, given what we know about the remission rate of non-medicated depressed patients, even the fabricated 67% depression remission rate should never have been celebrated by psychiatry and the mainstream media. While STAR*D received a great deal of publicity in 2006, another study reported that same year received almost no attention. This study, “The Naturalistic Course of Major Depression in the Absence of Somatic Therapy,” examined depressed patients who had recovered from an initial episode of depression, then relapsed but did not take any medication following their relapse. The recovery rate of these non-medicated depressed patients was tracked, and after one year, 85% of them recovered. The study authors concluded: “If as many as 85% of depressed individuals who go without somatic treatments spontaneously recover within 1 year, it would be extremely difficult for any intervention to demonstrate a superior result to this.”

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