Eli Lilly settles with U.S. Gov't for $1.42 billion over illegal Zyprexa off-label marketing

Yes, you read that right. Eli Lilly has reached a settlement for $1.42 billion with the U.S. government over the illegal off-label marketing of Zyprexa. The company also pleaded guilty to criminal misdemeanor charges. Basically this is how I see it:

U.S. Gov’t: Eli Lilly, you did a bad, bad thing by doing illegal things. Pay a fine, please, and then you can go.

Eli Lilly: Okayyyy. [reluctantly hands over $1.42 billion to the government]

U.S. Gov’t: [slaps Eli Lilly on the hand] Now, don’t you ever, ever do this again!

It’s a record settlement for a whistleblowing case. According to Philip Dawdy at Furious Seasons, Eli Lilly has paid over $2.7 billion in settlement payouts so far. (With certainly more to come.)

Wyeth Pushing Pristiq Hard

The Wall Street Journal reports that Wyeth, desperate to make money off of its Effexor XR-knockoff, Pristiq, says it will slash the antidepressant at a 20% discount compared to Effexor’s price. The price slash, CNN money reports, is a result of less-than-impressive clinical trial data on Pristiq’s “safety and effectiveness.”

Wyeth SVP Joe Mahady told analysts that Pristiq will sell for a flat $3.41 per tablet for both mid- and high-dose, Dow Jones Newswires’ Peter Loftus reports.

Wyeth, apparently, has done this in the past. Back when it was known as American Home Products, the company slashed its price on Protonix, its heartburn drug, to compete with AstraZeneca’s Prilosec. The drug generated $1.9 billion in profits for Wyeth last year. CNN Money reports that Teva Pharmaceuticals and Sun Pharmaceuticals began selling the generic version of the drug and handily cut into Wyeth’s profits: the company reported a 4.6% decline in profit and a 66% drop in sales for the drug for the first-quarter. What will happen with Pristiq remains to be seen. I’m not sure that doctors in 2010 will want to dole out prescriptions for Pristiq when they can save patients—and insurance companies—money by prescribing what will then be known as venlafaxine. WSJ also notes:

A month’s supply of sertraline (Pfizer’s old hit Zoloft) or fluoxetine (Lilly’s Prozac) goes for 50 cents a day at drugstore.com.

$3.41 or $0.50 per tablet. It wouldn’t surprise me if some insurance companies choose to exclude Pristiq from its list of covered drugs. Regardless, Wyeth expects sales of the drug to exceed $1 billion in its first year.

The drug will hit the shelves in May.

Alaska's "clinical" trial of Eli Lilly over Zyprexa

Since I've been gone, a trial has begun in Alaska against Eli Lilly because of its off-label drug marketing of Zyprexa. Then, Connecticut recently decided to join a growing list of states going after Lilly as a result of the Zyprexa deal. There is so much going on with this case I can't even keep up.

But that's what we keep Philip Dawdy around for. 🙂

Blogs around the way

I’m catching up on reading my fellow bloggers’ posts (see Blogroll to the right), so if you’re not reading their site already, I’d encourage you to do so. Below  are some posts that caught my attention. Some might be a little dated.

Gianna at Bipolar Blast: Has a video up of Gwen Olsen, an ex-pharma rep who says that pharmaceutical companies aren’t in the  business of curing but in the business of "disease maintenance and symptom management." It’s nothing new but here are two quotes that caught my attention:

"And what I’m saying is provable is that the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t want to cure people. You need to understand specifically when we’re talking about psychiatric drugs in particular that these are drugs that encourage people to remain customers of the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, you will be told if you’re given a drug such as an anxiolytic, or an antidepressant, or an antipsychotic drug, that you may be on the drug for the rest of your life. And very frequently, people find that they are on the drug for a very long period of time, if not permanently, because they’re almost impossible to get off of. Some of them can have very serious withdrawal symptoms – most of them can have extremely serious withdrawal symptoms if they’re stopped cold turkey – but some people experience even withdrawal symptoms when they try to titrate or they try to eliminate the drug little by little, day after day."

"We have got to start making the pharmaceutical industry accountable for their actions and for the defective products they’re putting on the market. It won’t be long before every American is affected by this disaster and we need to be aware of what the differences are between diseases between disorders and between syndromes. Because if it doesn’t have to be scientifically proven, if there are no tests, if there are no blood tests, CAT scans, urine tests, MRIs – if there is nothing to document that you have disease, then you in fact, do not have a disease, you have a disorder and it has been given and has been diagnosed pretentiously and you need to get yourself educated and understand that there are options and those options are much more effective than drugs."

I’ve always wondered why doctors don’t run tests to diagnose any psychiatric disorders. From NIMH:

Research indicates that depressive illnesses are disorders of the brain. Brain-imaging technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), have shown that the brains of people who have depression look different than those of people without depression. The parts of the brain responsible for regulating mood, thinking, sleep, appetite and behavior appear to function abnormally. In addition, important neurotransmitters–chemicals that brain cells use to communicate–appear to be out of balance. But these images do not reveal why the depression has occurred.

If MRIs have shown that the people with depression have a part of the brain that functions abnormally then why isn’t it standard for all people diagnosed with depression to have an MRI done to confirm this? I have one of two hypotheses:  it’s too expensive to get an MRI done for each person and that insurance won’t pay for it or the abnormal functioning cannot be detected in the brain of every depressed person.  Therefore, is major depressive disorder really a made-up diagnosis?

The Zoloft-rage/violence connection

[This post is quite lengthy so I suggest you grab a cup of coffee or tea and sit down and read it. The following is not for the faint of heart (or those with a lack of time).]

It’s been amazing to me that I’ve received numerous comments on Zoloft inducing rage. I’m humbled by having a Pittman supporter visit my site and post some comments from the ChristopherPittman.org forums. Read the following:

In my senior year in high school I was diagnosed as being severely depressed and put on medication. The first medication that I was on I took for 5 months and it made me really aggressive. My friends and family noticed the change and I told my doctor about it and she changed my meds. After that I was fine. I am normally a very passive person and will let just about anything fly. But the medication made me really aggravated and aggressive toward my friends and family and it seemed that I wasn’t overcoming my depression. I just got done watching the 48 hours investigation on the Discovery Times Channel and felt a connection with Chris. I felt that I had to write this to let you know that Chris is not the only one out there that had these side effects. I think there should be a study done to see how many people that take antidepressants have increased aggression. The problem is that the pharmaceutical industry has deep pockets and many lobbyists. I hope this helps in some way.

And another:

I remember the case when it happened.

At the time I thought, “Zoloft right”.

Let me tell you my physician put me on Zoloft and it took about three weeks for my to become psychotic and I’m a 50 year old woman.

I have three children and I don’t make a lot of money but please let me know if I can do anything for the Pittman boy.

The jury should have been placed on Zoloft before they made they decision. Unless you’ve experience it you simply cannot believe its’ effect.

I did a bit of quick reading/research into Zoloft triggering violence in people who otherwise would have never been violent and it seems that are a few stories out there to support the assertion. I found a few comments on depressionblog.com that mentioned a link between Zoloft and rage fits. A Salon.com article published a story antidepressants inducing rage in 1999. Apparently, Brynn Hartman, the wife of famous comedian Phil Hartman, killed herself and her husband while taking Zoloft. While close friends attribute the sudden behavior on the antidepressant, others attribute it to a combination of the medication with cocaine and alcohol in her system. (Zoloft does have a warning against alcohol use in conjunction with the drug.)

One interesting thing I learned from the article is that this kind of behavior is often labeled under the name akathisia on patient safety guides. Most – if not all – of the major antidepressants list akathisia as a side effect. Here’s the initial description of this condition from Wikipedia:

Akathisia, or acathisia, is an unpleasant subjective sensation of “inner” restlessness that manifests itself with an inability to sit still or remain motionless… Its most common cause is as a side effect of medications, mainly neuroleptic antipsychotics especially the phenothiazines (such as perphenazine and chlorpromazine), thioxanthenes (such as flupenthixol and zuclopenthixol) and butyrophenones (such as haloperidol (Haldol)), and rarely, antidepressants.

Akathisia may range in intensity from a mild sense of disquiet or anxiety (which may be easily overlooked) to a total inability to sit still, accompanied by overwhelming anxiety, malaise, and severe dysphoria (manifesting as an almost indescribable sense of terror and doom).

No real mention of extreme anger or irritability mentioned there. But if you read on…

The 2006 U.K. study by Healy, Herxheimer, and Menkes observed that akathisia is often miscoded in antidepressant clinical trials as “agitation, emotional lability, and hyperkinesis (overactivity)”. The study further points out that misdiagnosis of akathisia as simple motor restlessness occurs, but that this is more properly classed as dyskinesia. Healy, et. al., further show links between antidepressant-induced akathisia and violence, including suicide, as akathisia can “exacerbate psychopathology.” The study goes on to state that there is extensive clinical evidence correlating akathisia with SSRI use, showing that approximately ten times as many patients on SSRIs as those on placebos showed symptoms severe enough to drop out of a trial (5.0% compared to 0.5%).

Hirschfeld developed MDQ for GSK

“GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world’s leading research-based pharmaceutical healthcare companies, is committed to improving the quality of human life by enabling people to do more, feel better, and live longer.”

OK, I’ll be honest. I can’t keep up with my own posts and have no idea whether or not I’ve posted on this yet. Judging from the fact that I still have this bp booklet, I’m going to guess not. If I have, then there’s more.

When my psychiatrist diagnosed me with bipolar disorder in November, he handed me a bunch of material: a mood tracker (PDF), an article touting the benefits of Seroquel, and a booklet titled, “Bipolar Disorder,” which refers the reader to www.1on1.health.com.

The booklet seems pretty harmless to a patient newly diagnosed with bipolar disorder:

“Highs and lows can be part of life. But, with bipolar disorder, they can be severe. You may feel too depressed to get out of bed one day. Soon after, you may feel full of energy. You may have normal times between the highs and lows. When people have mood symptoms, it’s more likely to be depression.

Mood swings can be hard to predict. But you may have warning signs. You may even learn what can trigger your symptoms. You’ll read about this and more in this booklet.

Bipolar disorder is complex. Doctors docn’t know what causes it. They know that genes play a role. The illness may be linked to brain chemicals. These chemicals can get out of balance.

There are treatments to help control the symptoms. Learn about your condition. Get help for it. This booklet is a good first step.”

Thank you, GlaxoSmithKline.

GSK, the provider of such psych drugs as Lamictal, Paxil, and Wellbutrin, issues a series of booklets for patients referring them to 1on1health.com. The topics include depression, anxiety disorders, epilepsy, type 2 diabetes mellitus, high cholesterol, among others. The tips seems pretty simple and straightforward:

“Health and lifestyle chances may trigger your symptoms. Some common changes are:

Not having a sleep schedule
Misusing alcohol or drugs
Stopping your medicine, or starting medicine for depression or another illness
Having thyroid or other health problems”

Then it gets into the general stuff about the difference between mania, depression and further clarifies what hypomania and mixed moods are. Then, the kicker follows:

“If you think you may have bipolar disorder, fill out the checklist on the next two pages. Share it with your doctor. He or she can use it to help diagnose you.”

Furious Seasons posted a link about a fake drug named Havidol (which I totally got suckered into because I skimmed the post and missed the “OK, it’s a gag” part), but the hilarity stems from similarly stupid (and vague) questions. I’ve put a screenshot of the PDF GSK provides on their Web site to the right. My issue is not so much with the questions necessarily, but with the lead-in to them:

“Has there been a time when...” [emphasis mine]

It doesn’t matter whether you were 3 years old or 46 years old, if you answered “yes” to more than one “there’s ever been a time when” question, guess what? You MAY qualify for bipolar disorder! A sampling:

Has there ever been a time when…

• You were easily angered that you shouted at people or started fights?
• You felt much more sure of yourself than usual?
• You talked or spoke much faster than usual?
• You were so easily distracted that you couldn’t focus?
• You had much more energy than usual?
• You were much more active or did many more things than usual?
• You were much more social than usual?
• You were much more interested in sex than usual?

Guaranteed everyone reading this said “yes” to at least TWO questions. If not, I question whether you’re breathing. (Sadly enough, this makes me realize how easy it was for me to get fooled by the phony Havidol quiz.)

The follow-up to the questions above asks, “If you checked YES to more than one of the questions above, have several of these things happened during the same period of time?” Then, “How much of a problem did any of these things cause you (like not being able to work, or having money or legal troubles)? Choose one[:]

1. No problem
2. Minor problem
3. Moderate problem
4. Serious problem”

The multiple choice question above may not matter. Answering some of the lead-in questions in the affirmative may qualify you for the disorder.

Here’s a nice little tidbit. The questionnaire was “adapted with permission from Robert M.A. Hirschfeld, M.D.” So as an uninformed patient reading this (which I was at the time), I’m thinking, “Oh, this must be legit since they got permission from a doctor to use this checklist.” There’s more than meets the eye here.

On the surface, Dr. Hirschfeld seems like an awesome doctor – and he very well may be. Dr Hirschfeld’s bio from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) extols the “Professor and Chair” of its psychiatry deparment. He has history of working with various national organizations such as the National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association,  National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD). He’s written all kinds of articles and blah blah blah. He’s considered a leader in his research of bipolar disorder.

In fact, because Dr. Hirschfeld is so great, he’s a member of pharmaceutical boards and has acted as a consultant for pharmaceutical companies, according to ISI Highly Cited.com. Some of our favorite guys appear here: Pfizer, Wyeth, Abbott Labs., Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Forest Labs, Janssen, and – lookee here! – GSK.

The duration of Dr. Hirschfeld’s affiliations with these pharmaceutical companies are unspecified. All other “appointments/affiliations” have assigned years, i.e. 1972-1977, 2001-Present. His consulting affiliations follow his internship in 1968-1969. It looks a bit misleading to follow the consulting jobs after, oh say, 1969, and not provide dates of when he became a consultant for all of these pharma companies. Toward the end of the document that I found, his affiliations from 1986-Present are listed with various boards, associations, journals, and a slew of pharmaceutical companies.

Hello, hello, hello. He is a MEMBER of the Zyprexa U.S. Bipolar Academic Advisory Board, the Celexa/Excitalopram [sic] Executive Advisory Board, the Lamictal National Advisory Board, and the Zoloft Advisory Board.

Humor me here. His clinical trials include:

• 1994 Paroxetine for Dysthymia (SmithKline Beecham)
• 1995-97 Several (I found five) double-blind studies on sertraline and imipramine in patients qualifying for the DSM-III definition of major depressive disorder
• 1996-98 Gabapentin therapy for bipolar patients

And the list, including mirtazapine, fluoxetine, venlafaxine, lamotrigine, goes on. You can also find the “grants” pharma companies gave to fund these clinical trials.

From 1997-2000, Hirschfeld received a $100K grant from Abbott Labs to develop “a new checklist for bipolar symptoms.” (I’m not sure what the old one was.) In 2001, he received a $142K grant for the “Bipolar Prevalence and Impact MDQ Project.”

I don’t even need to look MDQ up. It’s Mood Disorder Questionnaire. The grant came from GSK, who “adapted” the questionnaire with Hirschfeld’s “permission.” That sounds simply gravy.

To understand more about bipolar disorder, you can listen to the stories of Greg, Stuart and Leslie – all your classic bipolar cases and how medication and/or therapy has helped them so much. You can also watch the bipolar
disorder animation that regurgitates all the things that we’ve become skeptical about.

In the meantime, remember the instructions included in Seroquel’s safety information that no one reads (excuse the crappy “Paint” job):

Decision Resources attempts to restore confidence in Big Pharma's atypicals

Whee for self-promotion!

“Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa Will Remain the Clinical Gold Standard for the Treatment of Schizophrenia Through 2015”

“Clinical Gold Standard,” huh?

I can’t bring anything new to the table on this. Maybe I’m wrong, but here I go:

“For almost three decades, Decision Resources has provided in-depth research on the trends, emerging developments, and market potential in various healthcare industry sectors.  Our client base is diverse – including large pharmaceutical companies, emerging biotechnology concerns, financial services, managed care organizations, and medical device manufacturers who turn to Decision Resources to help shape their strategy and master their chosen markets.

The privately-owned company offers a rich array of research publications advisory services, and consulting that make it second to none for quality, analytical depth and insight. With access to almost 10,000 thought leaders, specialists, HMO formulary directors, and general practitioners, Decision Resources’ highly-credentialed analysts are able to reconcile real-world practice with hard numbers from the industry’s most respected data sources.  The resulting analysis and insights drive business decisions and commercial success within the biopharmaceutical, managed care, medical device, and financial markets.”

Here’s my assessment, take it with a grain of salt: In an attempt to fight the decline in sales from the NYT-induced Zyprexa backlash, Eli Lilly has gone on the offensive and hired Decision Resources to reinvent its star medication.

Decision Resources (DR), a privately owned company (no hyphen if a modifier ends in “-ly”), has a client base that includes large pharmaceutical companies. Ta-da! Don’t get it?

Decision Resources is not a public company; hence, in addition to not receiving federal money, it doesn’t need to report its financial dealings to the SEC. Therefore, no publicly accessible financial records of DR’s clients. They haven’t said they are an “independent” organization. Perhaps this is implied. Whatever the case may be, DR gets paid by its client base to research their products and “help shape their strategy and master their chosen markets.”

This isn’t brain science; this is on their “About Us” section of their Web site. Therefore, if Eli Lilly turns to DR and pays them to – I like DR’s wording here – “shape their strategy and master their chosen markets,” then DR is essentially a PR loudspeaker letting everyone know that Zyprexa is the “clinical gold standard” for schizophrenia.

What a bunch of hooey.

Not too long ago, it seems that AstraZeneca (AZ) may have had DR engineer its new marketing strategy to give Seroquel a boost. Why not? Mental health media watchdogs are hatin’ on the atypical antipsychotics.

“According to a new report entitled Schizophrenia: Turning Physician Insight into Projected Patient Share, Zyprexa is superior in efficacy to all other current therapies, particularly on measures that are most important to prescribers, such as impact on global symptoms and responder rate.”

Holla at me if you’ve got your hands on that report mentioned above.

“In spite of scoring* less favorable than the other drugs in terms of safety and lower than risperidone in terms of delivery features, Zyprexa is the gold standard.”

OK – so it’s not safe and it doesn’t deliver as well as Risperdal – whatever that means – but Zyprexa is still “the gold standard”?

“This overall advantage for a drug with significant safety concerns highlights the importance of efficacy to prescribers.”

I want you to reread that: ” This overall advantage for a drug with significant safety concerns highlights the importance of efficacy to prescribers.” Let’s attempt to paraphrase this: The benefit of this potentially harmful drug shows the importance of how effective it is to those who receive the drug. Although Zyprexa has “significant safety concerns,” the drug works well enough for doctors to prescribe it to patients. Uh, no. Positives don’t outweigh the negatives. It was nice jargon for a second there, though. (If this is effed up enough for adults, why subject children to this crap?)

“The report also finds that the most commercially important emerging antipsychotics (Janssen’s Invega, Organon BioSciences’ asenapine, and Wyeth/Solvay/Lundbeck’s bifeprunox) score* lower than Zyprexa, indicating that Zyprexa will remain unsurpassed during Decision Resources’ forecast period.”

I know I’m doing a play-by-play but this is important. I need to find out how DR decided that Zyprexa would be the “gold standard” until 2015. (What’s the significance of this year? Does EL’s patent on Zyprexa expire then? Nope, Eli Lilly’s patent on Zyprexa expires in 2011. Expect a similar molecularly structured olanzapine before then. Biolexapine?) So basically, in this report, DR’s conclusion is Zyprexa beats every other atypical antipsychotic for schizophrenia by far. Notice that AZ’s Seroquel (the soon-to-be “gold standard” of bipolar meds),  an atypical also used for schizophrenia, is not listed. Not coincidence.

The little asterisk (*) next to the word “score” prompts me to wonder: Just how did they come up with these scores? Well, the asterisk tells me that I need to contact DR for the methodology behind the product scores. I just might. Then send it off to CL Psych or Furious Seasons to decipher the crap out of it.

Another thing to note on this PR:

“”Invega is a metabolite of risperidone and is likely to have efficacy similar to that of risperidone, which scored* slightly lower than Zyprexa overall,” said Nitasha Manchanda, Ph.D., analyst at Decision Resources. “Asenapine also lacks the differentiation to replace Zyprexa as the gold standard because it does not make as significant an impact on global symptoms, and bifeprunox is significantly inferior to Zyprexa in all primary efficacy measures and is not capable of surpassing Zyprexa.””

Dr. Manchanda, analyst for DR, pulled bifeprunox – not yet on the drug market – into the Zyprexa comparison and somehow was able to call it “significantly inferior to Zyprexa” with an incapability to “surpass” it. How many people have used bifeprunox, Ms. Manchanda? OK, now tell me how many people have used Zyprexa? And you’re telling me that a drug that hasn’t yet hit the market is “significantly inferior” to a drug that has been on the market for the past couple of years and has 1,200 lawsuits still pending in addition to the millions that have already been paid?

As for AZ, DR has determined that Seroquel will become the “gold standard” for bipolar medication by 2010, knocking Lamictal out of its current “gold standard” status. Like Furious Seasons, I had NO idea Lamictal was held up so highly for bipolar meds. Considering that lithium has always been the king of bipolar meds and treats both acute mania and depression better than Lamictal, I’m surprised to read this.

“According to the new DecisionBase report entitled Bipolar Depression: Turning Physician Insight into Projected Market Share, Seroquel’s advantages over Lamictal include the more profound effect on depressive symptoms seen in short-term trials.”

My doctor precribed Lamictal to me for management of depressive symptoms in bipolar disorder. He conversely prescribed Seroquel for mania (and to help me get sleep).  Getting back to the short-term trials, Lamictal was tested for 18 months for long-term management of bipolar disorder. Seroquel, however, was tested for 8 weeks. Effective for the short-term? Perhaps. But most patients on atypicals take them long-term. And that’s precisely where Seroquel fails.

“The drug’s efficacy on this measure differentiates it from other therapies, according to thought-leading psychiatrists, and the importance assigned to this measure by prescribing psychiatrists drives Seroquel’s product score above Lamictal’s.*”

According to thought-leading psychiatrists who probably function as consultants and analysts for “large pharmaceutical companies.” Seroquel may have the potential to sell more than Lamictal by 2010 – if this is what DR’s gauging. However, it seems like DR is trying to push Seroquel, not just as a better market share, but as a better product. In this “report,” DR also fails to compare Seroquel’s efficacy to Zyprexa’s. What a convenient absence for a product used for psychosis in bipolar disorder.

(ignore any spelling errors in this post. it’s late and i bumped my forehead against the edge of a car door in the rain. ouch.)

Catching up: Furious Seasons

I’ve been out of it. Really out of it.

In my backlog of reading, Furious Seasons has posted the results of what he’s entitled, "The Zyprexa Chronicles."

The judge ruled in favor of Lilly.

Holy crap. I knew this would happen, but hoped it wouldn’t.

This all occurred on Feb. 13, so I’m really behind the times here. (Did Punxsawtawney Phil see his shadow yet?) But it’s a reminder to, not just the blogosphere, but also to the media that, well, pharma companies are more powerful and have more sway in court.

After reading a bit more on the situation (ok – I’m getting all my info from ONE blog), it seems that the judge hasn’t really ruled against blogs using or disseminating these documents (MindFreedom.org being the exception apparently) but these leaked documents could cause Lilly "irreparable harm." What? Documents that need to be made public would harm Lilly? It’s David against Goliath. Mainstream media — CBS, ABC, NBC, AP — haven’t picked up on this story. The majority of Americans – I’d venture to say the majority of Zyprexa consumers – don’t know about the proven side effects of this drug. I highly doubt it would cause "irreparable harm."

Classic quote:

"The way reporters work is a good deal for the public. We get paid like school teachers, think like lawyers and detectives, fight like Marines when necessary and write like… oh, nevermind."

Man, ain’t it the truth. Especially the schoolteacher pay. Except in Brooklyn, NY where they’ll pay a starting teacher at $40K because they need teachers in the inner city. But I digress.

"So, Ms. [Marni] Lemons (Eli Lilly spokeswoman), what I reported on yesterday — that your company was talking about potentially downplaying glucose increases noted in studies used to approve Zyprexa for long-term use in bipolar disorder — was based on these documents and it sure looks to me like your employees were strategizing all over the Lilly email system. I contacted your press office on Monday and asked them to respond to several questions about that document. Your people never responded….

The same goes for you people at the FDA. Stop telling me to file FOIAs in order to get basic public information that affects millions of people that should already be freely available on your website."

For those who don’t know, FOIA stands for Freedom of Information Act, in which anyone can write to a governmental agency and appeal for documents that have been made public. The nice part about this? The agency can black out information that don’t want you to know. They can deny your request, block out some data, or block out so much that the document ends up being useless. Oh, and FOIAs take forever and freaking day to arrive because the gov’t sends them when it’s convenient for them.

Furious Seasons has also been following the NYT’s coverage about a child diagnosed with ADHD and bipolar, who was killed and supposedly overdosed on medication. Riiight. Unfortunately, from what I can see – perhaps I’ll find a bit more – the NYT is extensively covering mental health issues. Perhaps they’re getting a ton of hits on the Zyprexa series and have figured out that people actually care about mental health topics. Whatever the reasoning, I’m glad they’re doing it.

Astute observation from Furious Seasons:

"This whole diagnose-medicate-blame-the-"illness"-for-bad-outcomes nonsense has got to stop. It’s bad enough in adults and teens, but in kids it is a complete outrage. It is interesting to me, though, that when a child dies, the skeptical questions are asked. When an adult has awful results from taking Zyprexa, say, or Paxil, the media is largely silent."

More to come on other blogs…

Blogs vs. Mainstream Media

“Mr. [James B.] Gottstein, [a lawyer from Alaska, who was pursuing unrelated litigation for mentally ill patients in his state], sends [Dr. David Egilman, a consulting witness in ongoing litigation against Lilly] a subpoena for copies. Hell begins breaking loose.” – Tom Zeller, Jr. in The New York Times

I think Furious Seasons originally linked to this (I can’t remember the source of the post), but I read this on the NYT and had a few thoughts, regarding brick-and-mortar courts vs. “teh Internets.”

Warning: Rant ahead.

I can’t help but think back to the 2004 showdown between Dan Rather and CBS (endearingly named Rathergate) vs. political blogs regarding a memo about George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. From NewsMax:

“Added [Matthew] Sheffield [of RatherBiased.com]: ‘A virtual think-tank was born… Forty-seven posts later, a person who called himself ‘Buckhead’ offered the proposition that he thought the documents were forgeries.’

Sheffield and his Web site jumped on the bandwagon, searching the Web for experts on 1970’s typewriters. Another blogger site, PowerlineBlog.com, raised the question of forgery. ‘Matt Drudge and his DrudgeReport.com then linked to the Powerline piece, and the story took off,’ recounted Sheffield.”

Someone please tell Drudge about Zyprexa, Risperdal, Cymbalta, Seroquel, Abilify, and blah blah blah, psych med, blah blah blah.

“Some media observers now contend the “Blogosphere” is rapidly replacing CBS and the rest of the mainstream media.

“You’ll note that several blogs rank higher than mid-size daily newspapers and some are pushing the sites of papers in the top 50 (by daily circulation). The data suggest that the question isn’t “When will blogs arrive?” but rather “Blogs HAVE arrived, what now?” [said Kevin Aylward of Wizbangblog.]”

I’ll probably have a string of quotes from the newsmax article, but I will eventually get to my point.

I quoted this previously, but it’s worth requoting:

“It’s great that [Philip] Dawdy [of Furious Seasons] has stepped up for a huge, mainly voiceless population, but on the other hand, it’s weird to see citizen journalists so responsible for watchdogging our mental health industry. When we hear newspapers complain about declining readership, we can’t help but think it’s mainly because — gosh, this is awkward — the shit they’re reporting on isn’t newsworthy. And this shit is.” – Seattlest

Depression Checklist

The following is brought to you by Eli Lilly:

“Depression hurts. But you don’t have to.” Feel free to check Furious Seasons’ post featuring YouTube videos on Eli Lilly’s latest depression campaign.