Lyrics by Peter C Gøtzsche, 30 Nov 2022

After “Mother’s little helper” by the Rolling Stones 1966

Mick Jagger song: “And though she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill …” Back then, it was about abuse of benzodiazepines. Today, it is exactly the same with the abuse of depression pills, which have taken over the market of benzodiazepines and even expanded it. But the lyrics are not about depression pills. They are about ADHD drugs, which in rare cases kill children. See lyrics here.

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By Peter C Gøtzsche
Institute for Scientific Freedom
Copenhagen

6 October 2023

When the COVID-19 pandemic spread all over the world in early 2020, the Chinese government covered up its origin.^1,2 The Chinese cover up quickly extended to US academics with conflicts of interest, prestigious medical journals, the media, and the key advisor to the US President, Anthony Fauci.

It was an orchestrated effort to hide the obvious, which was too painful to admit, that the pandemic was highly likely caused by a lab leak in Wuhan, and that the virus, SARS-CoV-2, was highly likely manufactured at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.¹ In this lab, researchers take a harmless virus and make it deadly by genetic modification in so-called gain-of-function experiments.

The cover up was highly effective. It shaped the public opinion that the virus had a natural origin and had spread from animals to humans, even though not a single thread of evidence in support of this idea has ever been produced. Chinese censorship and threats against those who knew better¹ won the first round but the game has now been lost. Read full article

A new Report on improving mental health outcomes, a collaboration of scholars, activists, and survivors (James Gottstein, Esq, Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD, David Cohen, PhD, Chuck Ruby, PhD, Faith Myers) demonstrates that the mental health system’s standard interventions (especially overreliance on drugs and incarceration into psychiatric facilities) are harmful, counter-productive, and forced on unwilling patients. These standard interventions turn upside down known facts about what helps people in distress while they violate principles of international law. The authors recommend that People (relationships), Place (safe places to live), and Purpose (meaningful activities), alongside hope, all within a voluntary system of services, should be made broadly available via public and private programs. The authors describe over a dozen currently available approaches embodying these principles, which they suggest would both dramatically improve treatment outcomes and reduce treatment harms.

We wrote to JAMA Psychiatry on 3 August calling for retraction of a fraudulent trial report of fluoxetine in children and adolescents. Read our open letter here. On 21 September, Anette Flanagin,  Executive Managing Editor, Vice President, Editorial Operations JAMA and JAMA Network, sent a misleading response:

We shared your letter with the author of the study published in Archives of General Psychiatry and he does not identify any new concerns. Similarly, we do not find new evidence in support of your request to retract this article.

There are lots of evidence of fraud in the trial report, published with Graham Emslie as first author, and we provided this evidence. We have therefore kindly asked Flanagin, in the public interest:

1 To reconsider your decision not to retract Emslie’s paper.

2 If you still do not want to retract the paper, then to publish an erratum where you explain that what was published was seriously misleading and that many of the numbers presented in the article contrasted with the numbers in Eli Lilly’s clinical study report about the same trial.

3 If you still do not want to retract the paper, then to give us the opportunity to publish an account of the many errors in Emslie’s article, asking him to respond in the same issue. Such an opportunity should not be limited to a short letter to the editor, with a word count. It needs a full article, as there are so many errors in Emslie’s paper.  

4 To forward to us Emslie’s reply to you where he indicates that there is nothing to be concerned about in his article.

We feel it is your ethical duty towards the patients and their relatives to do this.

If Flanagin doesn’t act, she will not only sully the reputation of JAMA Psychiatry. The journal will also be seen as being complicit in future suicides caused by antidepressants as a direct harm of depression drugs. Read our full letter here.

Wakefield’s fraud created a false link between the MMR vaccine and autism. His “study” in The Lancet was retracted and he was struck off the UK’s medical register for committing unethical and fraudulent research on children. But he is nonetheless considered a hero in anti-vaxx circles, including in Robert F Kennedy Jr’s organisation, Children’s Health Defense, where he shall speak at a three-day conference in November.

Wakefield has now sunk so deep that he wouldn’t recommend kids to get any vaccine. This anti-vaxx movement, headed by Wakefield, is likely highly lethal. The measles vaccine, for example, has saved millions of lives. I have therefore uploaded, freely available, the chapter on measles from my book, “Vaccines: truth, lies, and controversy,” where I give a detailed account of Wakefield’s horrendous fraud and related issues.

I have also written a short article about the latest developments. …

Andrew Wakefield: A horribly harmful fraudster and anti-vaxx heroRead More »

Why did governments all over the world and their so-called experts lie profusely about the effect of face masks when they don’t seem to work? And why did Cochrane throw its researchers under the bus both in 2020 and in 2023, thereby undermining its own credibility? Read the bizarre story here.

Earlier this month, I received an odd email from an associate editor of a medical journal, written in exceptionally poor English, asking for my help. Out of curiosity, I asked: “Since you seem to have a problem, how much do you pay authors to help you?” The editor replied that I was going to pay them, not the opposite, and, as it is customary for predatory journals, she did not tell me how much. Read my article here.

All reputable medical journals have an impartial mechanism for dealing with allegations of editorial misconduct. In the past, this was also the case for the Cochrane Library. Today, Cochrane’s attitude can best be described as, “We don’t give a damn. We are beyond reproach.” Cochrane’s ongoing crisis caused by multiple missteps – most recently the scandal its Editor-in-Chief caused when she apologized for Cochrane’s review that showed a lack of effect of face masks although there was nothing to apologize for – was recently described as a tailspin. Read my account of Cochrane’s editorial misconduct in relation to our review of safe withdrawal of depression drugs here.

By Peter C Gøtzsche

My article on Mad in America, “The media’s false narrative about depression pills, suicides, and saving lives” from 23 August was mentioned on Mad in Norway (in Norwegian) two days ago:

“Terrible falsehoods from the Norwegian Psychiatric Association. Untrue statements about drugs. Psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry are accused of spreading false positive information about drug effects through financially lubricated information channels. The ‘Pill shame’ editorial from the board of the Norwegian Psychiatric Association contains so many untruths that they seem to suffer from collective delusions. That’s what doctor and scientist Peter Gøtzsche says in an article on Mad in America. He picks apart their claims and believes the solution is to let the psychiatrists get a taste of their own medicines … he uses the pill-shaming plot by the Association as an example of how the media are ‘programmed’ to give free rein to the prevailing psychiatric regime.”

I have today written to the board of the Norwegian Psychiatric Association:

“I find it very sad that a psychiatric association can write so much that is so misleading or wrong in a newspaper. I have described the problems in the attached article. I have no hopes that you will come to respect the most reliable research we have in psychiatry; your guild interests are far too great for that. But now I have at least tried. Mad in America has about 2 million monthly users, so your misconceptions about your profession are now out, all over the world. For the sake of the patients and their relatives, I hope you will retract your erroneous statements. They are very harmful to public health.”

In my article, I give five main reasons why psychiatric drugs are portrayed in the media in a light that is far too positive and also describe a horribly misleading BBC report from 9 August. In the commentary section below my article, I have added a sixth main reason:

Inspired by a close collaborator who has a huge experience of working with journalists, I want to say this, based on his email to me:

There are also substantial pressures from users of depression pills. They can have a decisive role when the editors remove critical comments on the use of these pills. Some of them are activists, either individually (including celebrities, journalists/hosts from TV programs) or in organisations. Often, they have rather blunt demands to have their individual experiences of being helped mentioned. And often with a readiness to be offended, e.g. if you “don’t recognize their illness” or if you question the use of psychotropic drugs. During research and casting for broadcasts about depression in particular, many journalists will feel the need to accommodate these individual, anecdotal and unscientific stories, often with contributions from various psychiatrists who support them. The result is horrifying. The science is edited out in favour of personal accounts. If I were to list the worst challenges in telling the truth about the drugs and the harms they cause, these activist patients would be at the very top. Followed by editors’ fear of offending consensus. Oddly enough, people also buy the argument that any bad publicity about psychotropic drugs can cost human lives. They don’t seem to know that psychiatric drugs do not save lives; they kill very many people.

By Peter C Gøtzsche

Together with 10 people who each lost a child or spouse to suicide as a direct consequence of being prescribed an antidepressant drug for a non-psychiatric condition, I have today written to the editors of two journals and called for retraction of three fraudulent trial reports of antidepressants in children and adolescents.

The trial reports seriously underreported suicide attempts, other suicidal events, and precursors to suicide and violence on active drug, and exaggerated the benefits of the drugs substantially.

If the editors don’t act, they will not only sully the reputation of their journals. They will also be seen as being complicit in future suicides caused by antidepressants as a direct harm of these drugs. Read our open letter to the editors here.