This week, a man died who had a profound effect on my close friends and the part of the world I live in. His name was Will Campbell [Rev. Will D. Campbell, Maverick Minister in Civil Rights Era, Dies at 88]. When I met him in the late 1970s, he was already the stuff of legend, but when he started back in the 1950s, no one ever would have predicted that. He was just a young white preacher in Mississippi who saw that there was something very wrong and he could never stop seeing it, at a time and in a place where it was a very lonely thing to see.
HEALY: Dr. Nemeroff came up to me in the course of the meeting in what was a very scary meeting between him and me and told me that my career would be destroyed if I kept on showing results like the ones that I’d just shown, that I had no right to bring out hazards of the pills like these.MACINTYRE: In a written statement, a doctor who witnessed the confrontation told us, when it became clear that David Healy would not back down from his points of view, Nemeroff said that what Healy was publishing might harm the drug industry, specifically Eli Lilly. He, Charles Nemeroff, said that these people were ruthless and would go to great lengths to make life hard for academics who published articles associating suicide with Prozac.HEALY: It was a fairly short encounter. It lasted about two or three minutes but a very scary one.
The first footnote was at the end of a post on Dr. David Healy’s blog [We have a Dream: Getting engaged to a doctor] that says, "I have recently been disinvited from a Catholic Church linked meeting on psychotropic drugs and children apparently for using an analogy between child abuse in the Church and pharmacotherapy abuse in clinical care." [see Vatican to Hear Debate About Psychotropic Meds for Children and STUDY MEETING: THE CHILD AS A PATIENT]. It’s really a shame. They’re having some real luminaries on the topic [Robert Whitaker, Irving Kirsch, Joanna Moncrieff, Pat Bracken, Giovanni Fava, etc.], but they’re excluding the guy that got the whole topic on the table in the first place twenty plus years ago because he made an obvious analogy.
The second was added to a response letter in the British Medical Journal [academic psychiatry, research ethics and the pharmaceutical industry] that I referenced Tuesday [coffee-house science…]. In 2000 when Dr. Healy had his confrontation, Dr. Nemeroff was at the top of his game, referred to "the boss of bosses" and "bling-bling." Since then, he lost a major editorship, has been investigated by the US Senate, and removed from the chairmanship at Emory all over gross conflicts of interest. He’s been referred to as the "poster child for conflicts of interest" and "so toxic he glows," yet the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, has invited him to give the inaugural Annual Lecture at its new Centre for Affective Disorders. The article in the BMJ was critical of that decision. I don’t know what prompted the footnote ["Editorial note: This response was modified on legal advice on 7 June 2013"] or even what was modified in the letter, but my fantasy is that Dr. Nemeroff or those that invited him complained. When POGO exposed him as having signed on to a ghost-written textbook several years ago, he and Dr. Alan Schatzberg mounted a legal attack rather than admit the obvious [roaches…, enter the lawyers…].
Nemeroff’s comment to Healey sounds like Corleone in ‘The Godfather’ –
“… made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
I have to remind myself that this is about ‘medicine’…
It’s surreal.
Duane
oops, spelling – Healy
There’s a lot of civil and human rights at the core for people in the recovery movement.
Drug dealers forcing their products on people with courts enforcing it makes whomever is snared by a psychiatrist a class of people who can be denied their rights with the slimmest justifications, which gives others excuses to abuse and neglect people labeled with a mental disorder— even to the point that mental patients die from medical illnesses that a doctor didn’t take seriously because of the perception that the mentally ill are making everything up, always.
YOU, Mickey, are like Will Campbell.
NO ETHICS NO MORALS NO ANSWERS
Doc Mickey,
I’ve tried posting to your forum in the past and for some reason my comments are never posted so I’m trying another avenue.
Somewhat on topic is our petition for which I need the help of your readership. I’ve posted a link to the change.org website. Please give us a helping hand and sign on..
Caution: Do not volunteer for any medical research until you read this petition.
Your readers might also want to follow our struggles righting another wrong at:
http://www.vnstherapy-herb.blogspot.com
Warmly,
Herb
http://www.vnstherapy-herb.blogspot.com
NO ETHICS NO MORALS NO ANSWERS
Doc Mickey,
I’ve tried posting to your forum in the past and for some reason my comments are never posted so I’m trying another avenue.
Somewhat on topic is our petition for which I need the help of your readership. I’ve posted a link to the change.org website. Please give us a helping hand and sign on.
Caution: Do not volunteer for any medical research until you read this petition.
The readers might also want to follow our struggles righting another wrong at:
http://www.vnstherapy-herb.blogspot.com
Warmly,
Herb
http://www.vnstherapy-herb.blogspot.com
People give me grief about my comments regarding antisocial traits/ pure disorders in people of positions of power/academic leadership. Yeah, don’t think it is too hard to figure out what Nemroff is!
How these scum in psychiatry manipulate and control the very people who should see the psychopathology and refute it, harshly and punitively, just reinforces to me there are too many whores and cowards in psychiatry,
Don’t worry, the fact that the general public is accepting of our Current Occupant of the White House announcing, not explaining nor at least partially apologizing for the phone and Internet eavesdropping, shows that ignorance and faithless tolerance transcends educational and social standings.
And that is why antisocial and sociopathic behaviors seem to proliferate in this country.
Tolerance leads to totalitarianism, eh?
“Because our world is not the same as Othello’s world. You can’t make flivvers without steel-and you can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma. Which you go and chuck out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!” He laughed. “Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello! My good boy!”
“it seems upside down. Because it is…” As in times immemorial.
It’s about power, positions, wealth, power. The Catholic Church protects itself, tars a critic, dr Healy, by disinviting him – as British psychiatrists protect their vested interests by refusing to disinvite dr Nemeroff – as the Inquisition protected the interests of state and church aristocracy – setting in motion what has been described as “The formation of a persecuting society”, R. I. Moore, Blackwell Publishing 2007.
When we’ve shed illusions of a just world, injustice is easier to tackle, I think. But the beginning is very hard, why few stay the course and are penalized to scare the rest of us into submission – by persecuting people like Will Campbell, Maritn Luther King, the executed youngsters Hans and Sophie Scholl of The White Rose in wartime Munich, Aung Sann Suu Kuy of Myanmar, Nelson Mandela and countless unknown resisters “seeing something they could not stop seeing”, entering a trajectory they did not anticipate. the eternal struggle for a better world.
In Dante’s purgatory (The Devine Comedy) some sinners are beyond redemption, in eternal hell… My guess is quite a gang from the corporate aristocracy of Big Pharma, Big finance and Politics meet there…
Doc Mickey,
Thanks for correcting that glitch.
Herb
Duane,
Thanks for your support. Although we may occasionally have differences on some issues our hearts and caring are in the right place while trying to help those who are often severely challenged and less able to advocate for themselves.
Once again, thanks and I hope all is well with your son, as I recall.
Warmly,
Herb
vnsdepression@gmail.com
http://www.vnstherapy-herb.blogspot.com
Unbelievable!!
Herb (the man of many names & faces) reappears. This is someone who has unapologetic-ally & viciously trumpeted the pharmaceutical industry’s horn all over the internet for over a decade…
Herb is a champion and defender of Charles Nemeroff”s unscrupulous actions and their in tandem VNS implant scam for profit…Of course Herb was & is most likely still very much vested both financially and pseudo intellectually in the promotion of this dangerous voodoo science VNS device implant and procedure…
You’ll have to do a whole lot better than your late for supper call for the protection of clinical trial victims at this juncture Herbie. It will take a lot more than some mere shallow & disingenuous VNS blog post to muster any credibility what so ever among those who know and can document the true nature of your seedy and dubious character.
Worth looking at The Independent (www.independent.co.uk) for the smiling face of “disgraced US professor” 11/6/2013