{"id":37219,"date":"2013-06-08T12:50:57","date_gmt":"2013-06-08T16:50:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=37219"},"modified":"2013-06-09T01:58:25","modified_gmt":"2013-06-09T05:58:25","slug":"two-footnotes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2013\/06\/08\/two-footnotes\/","title":{"rendered":"two footnotes…"},"content":{"rendered":"
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.<\/em><\/strong><\/sup><\/div>\n
Aldous Huxley<\/strong><\/sup><\/div>\n

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<\/font><\/strong> [Rev. Will D. Campbell, Maverick Minister in Civil Rights Era, Dies at 88<\/a>]. 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.<\/p>\n

I’ve been hearing my friends tell Will Campbell stories and reading others in the news all week, and I think it has been in the background of what I’ve been writing about [Dr. Charles Nemeroff – coffee-house<\/em> science…<\/a> and Dr. David Healy – anecdotes…<\/a>]. I haven’t mentioned their famous confrontation [The David Healy Affair<\/a>] in 2000, but it has been much on my mind. I noted in anecdotes…<\/a> that Dr. Healy’s early observations of suicidality from SSRIs came at the very beginning of his formal academic career [1990] and seem to have shaped it ever since – taking him in a direction he never really intended to go. It’s like that when you see something that you can’t stop seeing. After lecturing about what he couldn’t not see in Toronto in 2000 where he had accepted an academic position, Drs. Healy and Nemeroff had a brief exchange<\/a>:<\/div>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
HEALY<\/font><\/u>: 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.<\/div>\n
MACINTYRE<\/font><\/u>: 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.<\/div>\n
HEALY<\/font><\/u>: It was a fairly short encounter. It lasted about two or three minutes but a very scary one.<\/div>\n

<\/strong><\/sup><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The end of the story is that David Healy lost the position in Toronto as a result. The documents are archived as The David Healy Affair<\/a>. The thing that reminded me of that story was the one about Will Campbell being fired as a Chaplain<\/a> at the University of Mississippi in 1956 for playing ping-pong with a black pastor. With all of that in my mind, I ran across two footnotes today that I found disquieting:<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

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<\/a>] 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.<\/em>" [see Vatican to Hear Debate About Psychotropic Meds for Children<\/a> and STUDY MEETING: THE CHILD AS A PATIENT<\/a>]. 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.<\/p>\n

The second was added to a response letter in the British Medical Journal<\/font><\/strong> [academic psychiatry, research ethics and the pharmaceutical industry<\/a>] that I referenced Tuesday [coffee-house<\/em> science…<\/a>]. 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<\/font><\/strong> 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<\/em>"] or even what was modified<\/em> in the letter, but my fantasy is that Dr. Nemeroff or those that invited him complained. When POGO<\/font><\/strong> 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…<\/a>, enter the lawyers…<\/a>]. <\/p>\n

The irony of these two footnotes is fairly obvious. And they remind me a lot of the kind of things that happened back in the Civil Rights days, those days before Will Campbell and people like Martin Luther King and John Lewis became legends. Here we sit 13 years after the confrontation in Toronto and one remains in the mainstream giving the keynote lecture at a prestigious clinic launch in London, and the other one is being ostracized from a conference focused on child welfare and overmedication. It seems upside down. Because it is…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history. Aldous Huxley 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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37219"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37273,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37219\/revisions\/37273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}