We wrote to JAMA Psychiatry on 3 August calling for retraction of a fraudulent trial report of fluoxetine in children and adolescents. Read our open letter here. On 21 September, Anette Flanagin, Executive Managing Editor, Vice President, Editorial Operations JAMA and JAMA Network, sent a misleading response:
We shared your letter with the author of the study published in Archives of General Psychiatry and he does not identify any new concerns. Similarly, we do not find new evidence in support of your request to retract this article.
There are lots of evidence of fraud in the trial report, published with Graham Emslie as first author, and we provided this evidence. We have therefore kindly asked Flanagin, in the public interest:
1 To reconsider your decision not to retract Emslie’s paper.
2 If you still do not want to retract the paper, then to publish an erratum where you explain that what was published was seriously misleading and that many of the numbers presented in the article contrasted with the numbers in Eli Lilly’s clinical study report about the same trial.
3 If you still do not want to retract the paper, then to give us the opportunity to publish an account of the many errors in Emslie’s article, asking him to respond in the same issue. Such an opportunity should not be limited to a short letter to the editor, with a word count. It needs a full article, as there are so many errors in Emslie’s paper.
4 To forward to us Emslie’s reply to you where he indicates that there is nothing to be concerned about in his article.
We feel it is your ethical duty towards the patients and their relatives to do this.
If Flanagin doesn’t act, she will not only sully the reputation of JAMA Psychiatry. The journal will also be seen as being complicit in future suicides caused by antidepressants as a direct harm of depression drugs. Read our full letter here.