The Results From Two NIMH Studies: TEOSS and STAR*D

If you or your child take SSRI antidepressants or neuroleptic, "antipsychotic" drugs, you may have been  misinformed about the safety and efficacy of the drugs and the risks involved in taking them by your prescriber, through direct to consumer advertising, and/or through education and anti-stigma campaigns, and family support programs provided by advocacy groups...


Both the STAR*D and TEOSS drug trials demonstrated that SSRI antidepressants and neuroleptic drugs, called "antipsychotics," were not "safe and effective treatment" for the majority of the people participating in these two federally funded drug trials.  Why are they advertised as both in the media?  Consumer Protection and Truth in Advertising Laws do not apply to psychiatric drugs, but do to vitamins and nutritional supplements, marketed directly to the general public in print, over the internet and on radio and television. 


"The NIMH's CATIE trial of antipsychotics for adult schizophrenia is regularly understood to have shown that atypical antipsychotics are "no better" than the old standard antipsychotics. The CATIE study was one of several government-funded trials, here in the United States and in the United Kingdom, to come to that finding. But another conclusion to draw from CATIE is that neither the old drugs or the new ones can really be said to "work" for most patients, given that 74% of the 1,432 patients in the trial stopped taking the assigned antipsychotic within 18 months, mostly because of "intolerable side effects" or the drug's "inefficacy."
Now the 12-month results from the NIMH-funded "Treatment of Early-Onset Schizophrenia Spectrum" study are about to be published, and, unfortunately, in this age group (eight to nineteen years old), the results are even more disappointing. Only 14 of the 116 youth (12%) responded to the study medication and were able to successfully stay on it for one year. In other words, the 74% failure rate in adults climbed to 88% in youth."  Robert Whitaker in his Mad in America column in Psychology Today.

“In my five plus years investigating STAR*D, I have identified one scientific error after another. ….But all of these errors – without exception had the effect of making the effectiveness of the antidepressant drugs look better than they actually were, and together these errors led to published reports that totally misled readers about the actual results.

As such, this is a story of scientific fraud, with this fraud funded by the National Institute of Mental Health at a cost of $35 million.”  Ed Pigott in his article, STAR*D: Adding Fiction to Fiction read Ed's article.

From The Alliance for Human Research Protection:

"An audit by Daniel Levinson, Inspector General of DHHS, confirms what has already been documented: that antipsychotics are widely misprescribed for unapproved uses and  taxpayers are saddled with the high cost  through Medicaid and Medicare.

Antipsychotics are used primarily as chemical restraints to control behavior-- not for any therapeutic, medically justifiable reason.. The claimed benefit for patients has never been supported by independent scientific evidence.

The life-shortening hazards of Antipsychotic drugs-- for adults and children -- have been documented and verified by the National Institute of Mental Health.  Indeed, antipsychotics  carry a  black box warning label about sudden deaths in the elderly. This is not to say, that they are less dangerous for children for whom they are also widely misprescribed.

The reason antipsychotics have become blockbusters--cash cows for the drug industry--is that they are prescribed overwhelmingly for patients whose medical care is paid for by taxpayers."  read the rest here.