Scientific Misconduct and Fraud: The Final Nail in Psychiatry’s Antidepressant Coffin Series, Epilogue 2

Shidonna Raven
6 hours ago
3 min read

By Bruce E. Levine

January 17, 2024

Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,

Epilogue

While Miller stops short of concluding that Pigott’s reanalysis is proof of STAR*D investigators fraudulently inflated remission results, he recognizes that psychiatry needs to deal with the reality that if STAR*D’s authors had in fact inflated remission results, this has resulted in psychiatry doing great harm to the general public.

Historically, establishment psychiatry and Big Pharma have routinely made declarations about mental illness causes and treatments that are, soon after being declared, disproven by research; this followed by psychiatry taking 10 to 20 years to acknowledge such false claims; which is then followed by the mainstream media taking another 10 to 20 years to report that psychiatry has moved on to other theories and treatments. Always psychiatry repeats some version of its slogan: “We are a young science that is making great progress.”

We have seen this phenomenon with respect to the chemical imbalance theory of low levels of serotonin causing depression, which was definitively disproven by researchers by the 1990s, a discarding that establishment psychiatry would not unequivocally acknowledge until 2011, and which was finally reported in the mainstream media in 2022.

It is likely that we are witnessing this same phenomenon with respect to standard antidepressant treatment. Politically astute psychiatrists know that the mainstream media will eventually report standard antidepressant realities, and so the most politically astute among them are now promoting other treatments, including ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic and party drug known on the street as “Special K.” Ketamine clinics are popping up throughout the United States, including those offered by Field Trip, a national chain of clinics. However, the research on ketamine as an antidepressant is worse than disappointing.

A Stanford University study published in early 2023 compared intravenous ketamine to an active placebo and concluded: “A single dose of intravenous ketamine compared to placebo has no short-term effect on the severity of depression symptoms in adults with major depressive disorder.” Janssen Pharmaceuticals has created a ketamine nasal spray called esketamine (branded as Spravato), which received a highly controversial FDA approval in 2019. A study presented at the American Psychiatric Association annual conference in 2023 reported no difference between intravenous ketamine and esketamine; and the British Journal of Psychiatry reported in 2020 the following about esketamine: “Licensing trials did not establish efficacy: two trials were negative, one showed a statistically significant but clinically uncertain effect, and a flawed discontinuation trial was included, against Food and Drug Administration precedent.” Furthermore, a 2022 review published in the journal Pharmacotherapy listed common adverse effects of ketamine: feeling weird, strange, or bizarre in 78% of patients; spacey in 74%; woozy/loopy in 72%; and dissociations in 62% of patients.

The question for Ed Pigott, Robert Whitaker, myself, and others who have spent a good part of our professional lives debunking psychiatry’s latest absurdities is this: Are we simply like Sisyphus, rolling an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time we near the top? This is a somewhat depressing question, however, I do have my own personal antidepressant, which is Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus argues that the realization of the absurd does not justify suicide, and instead compels rebellion that can be vitalizing. Camus concludes, “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct

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