1 Boring Old Man

Who knew that there was a website called waybackmachine.org that would search for web content that was long gone? Phyllis Vine knew. That’s who knew.

Ghostwriting controversy at APA
^{…unanswered questions}
April 11, 2011

The American Psychiatric Association [APA] is having a hard time harnessing a controversy brought by muckrackers, its own members, and reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Allegations persist that a book published under its imprint was principally ghostwritten. And neither the authors, nor the association, nor the company involved, Scientific Therapeutics Inc. [STI], have satisfied doubts that Alan Schatzberg and Charles Nemeroff, were actually the "authors" as the term is conventionally understood…

A 1997 letter from STI put forth a timetable for producing text and dates for comments to be returned. It also included questions STI writers wanted them to address, such as, "Should thyroid hormone augmentation of resistant depression be included or is this an issue not commonly encountered in primary care?"

POGO investigates

Media interest grew after Paul Thacker, Project on Government Oversight (POGO), wrote to the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH),Francis Collins, inquiring about breaches of ethics he found in legal documents involving Paxil. Picked up by The New York Times last November, with modest corrections in December, it became public. An early APA response said there was "active involvement of Schatzberg and Nemeroff in every stage of the book’s development." It pointed to marginal, initialed comments. The named authors also claimed there were changing standards of "guidelines for authorship." A subsequent request for APA transparency by outside psychiatrists Bernard Carroll, former chairman of psychiatry at Duke University, and Robert T. Rubin, UCLA, were ignored… Before denials added muscle to the current controversy, STI displayed the book as a product on its website. [Shown … with STI imprint.] The entire page has since been removed…

There it is. Proudly displayed in STI’s Portfolio of Publications. Good work, Sally Laden! Great job, Diane Coniglio! Bravo STI! Ghostwriters of the year!

As best I can tell, it was removed from their web-site in 2008. That was when Senator Grassley was investigating Nemeroff, resulting in his losing his Chairmanship at Emory. I guess they could see what was coming and tried to wipe the scene clean. Kudos to Phylis Vine for finding the latent fingerprints!