1 Boring Old Man

A message from Carl Elliott:

In early December, we delivered a petition signed by over 3,500 of you to Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, calling for an investigation of the death of Dan Markingson in a University of Minnesota psychiatric research study. That same week, the Faculty Senate at the university also overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for an investigation.

Yet four months later, we still have seen no results. The president of the university, Eric Kaler, has indicated publicly that any review he commissions will not include an investigation of Dan Markingson’s death. Governor Dayton has not even acknowledged our petition.

In the meantime, evidence is accumulating that Dan Markingson was not the only patient who died or was seriously injured in psychiatric research studies at the university. Two investigative news reports have appeared with evidence of misconduct involving other patients. A confidential letter has emerged indicating that the Institutional Review Board was aware of ethical problems with psychiatric research at the University in 2009, and that it was concerned enough to request an external investigation. And for over six months, the university has stonewalled our open records requests for reports of deaths and serious injuries in psychiatric research studies.

You can find more information about these issues at:

www.danmarkingson.com

So we need your help. We are organizing a series of actions beginning this week with a call-in campaign to Governor Mark Dayton and University of Minnesota Board of Regents Chairman Richard Beeson. We are asking you to make a phone call as soon as possible to the offices of Dayton and Beeson and leave a message asking for action. Here are phone numbers [and if you need it, a suggested script for your call.]

Please make your voice heard. And let us know that you called by leaving a comment at www.danmarkingson.com.

Thanks,

Carl Elliott

Richard Beeson
Office of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents
Phone: 612-625-6300

Gov. Mark Dayton

Phone 651-201-3437
Toll Free: 800-657-3717

Dan Markingson died by his own hand, a victim of an illness that dates to antiquity. He became a part of a study he should never have been enrolled in – a study that had no medical indication but was rather an experimercial. He was put on a maintenance dose of a blinded medication that wasn’t working. He languished in a treatment facility that did not adjust his treatment to his illness for six months as part of a legal double bind. And not long after hearing that his commitment was to be extended, he killed himself in a bizarre way – consistent with his untreated illness. All of that in a Trial that shouldn’t have been.

The kind of paranoid psychosis Dan had is a big time illness – it can be a lethal illness. Dan’s lethality was there the day he was admitted. He could have succumbed with the best of treatment, but we’ll never know because he didn’t get it. This may even be a case where, in spite of the dominant view of these medications, he may well have been grossly undermedicated, at least early on. But we don’t know that either. All we know is that he was adjudicated to a treatment he never received. Rather, he became a pawn in a marketing chess game.