The Cochrane Tapes reveal a horrendous show trial against a critic of psychiatry

I (Peter Gøtzsche) recently published an article with this title and explained why the Cochrane Collaboration’s motto “Trusted evidence” is misleading. Virtually every Cochrane review of psychiatric drugs should be distrusted because there is too little attention to all the flaws in the trials. As an example, the Cochrane 2021 network meta-analysis of depression pills in children, with the editor of the Cochrane Common Mental Disorders Group, Sarah Hetrick, as first author, is garbage in, garbage out, and so misleading that it is outright dangerous. It is similarly misleading as the 2018 notorious network meta-analysis by Cipriani et al. in Lancet, which I described as: “Rewarding the companies that cheated the most in antidepressant trials.” A commentator wrote that nothing will change unless the recommendations of previous critiques are actually implemented: To continue “flogging the Cochrane Review dead horse” won’t make it run.

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