By Peter C Gøtzsche
Institute for Scientific Freedom
Copenhagen

6 November 2023

The day after I was expelled from the Cochrane Governing Board and from the Cochrane Collaboration on 13 September 2018, four board members resigned in protest. Two days later, they gave their reasons in an email, “Why we resigned,” which they sent to Cochrane colleagues asking them to help distribute the letter to others. They also uploaded their letter on the Austrian Cochrane Centre’s website but were immediately asked by Cochrane’s leadership to remove it, which they did. One of Cochrane’s key principles is transparency. I therefore bring the letter below, which Cochrane misrepresented in a defamatory way. Read full article.

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By Peter C Gøtzsche
Institute for Scientific Freedom
Copenhagen

5 Dec 2023

Summary 

Official guidelines and statements from the authorities and psychiatrists have denied for decades that depression drugs can cause dependence, and this denial is still seen today. They also underestimate substantially the severity and duration of the withdrawal symptoms. They provide dangerous advice about tapering procedures that are far too quick and does not respect the hyperbolic binding curves of the drugs to brain receptors, or they provide no tapering advice at all apart from useless statements about gradually reducing the dose, which is seen in package inserts. The massive use of depression drugs is not evidence-based but marketing-driven. These drugs do not have clinically relevant effects on depression; they double the risk of suicide; and have many other important harms. In clinical trials, the patients prefer a placebo for an active drug.The main focus in the coming years should be on avoiding prescribing depression drugs and on helping those who are on them to come off them as safely as possible. Read the article

Sir Iain Chalmers, the founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, and Jeremy Howick invited me to give a lecture in 2019 at an MSc course in Oxford about the history and philosophy of evidence-based healthcare. They asked me to share my personal experiences and research on conflicts of interest under the heading, “Power versus rationality.” In other words, it was about speaking truth to power. As this subject might have general interest, I have summarised my lecture here.

We, a doctor and a lawyer, have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing biological paradigm in psychiatry. We recommend an approach we call humanistic psychiatry.

Humanistic psychiatry focuses on the patients’ troubles, and on how they can best be helped, respecting their experiences, values, preferences, and autonomy. Coercion is not an option.

Biological psychiatry assumes that mental health issues are caused by abnormalities in the brain and that psychiatric drugs can help normalise these abnormalities. No reliable research exists in support of this idea.

Mental health issues are not medical issues, and psychiatry should not be seen as a medical specialty but as a humanistic enterprise. Read the Humanistic Psychiatry Declaration

Why some of us no longer want to publish in prestigious medical journals

By Peter C Gøtzsche
Institute for Scientific Freedom
Copenhagen

14 November 2023

Being one of the few people in the world who have published over 100 papers in “the big five,” BMJ, Lancet, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine and New England Journal of Medicine, I know how to get my work into the most prestigious medical journals. But I rarely knock on the door now. We discussed some of the reasons for preferring to publish elsewhere during a two-day meeting in Copenhagen in October 2022, Lack of scientific freedom: causes, consequences and cures, arranged by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford and my Institute for Scientific Freedom. The most important reasons are: …

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Nachfolgend finden Sie nur die Abschnitte betreffend ADHS übersetzt mit chatGPT 3.5, open.ai und Bard, Google; diese Übersetzung wurde überarbeitet von Gabriel Morales Abellán, Lagerraum13.com; lesen Sie das ganze Buch kostenlos im Internet (Critical Psychiatry Textbook). 

Lyrics by Peter C Gøtzsche, 30 Nov 2022

After “Mother’s little helper” by the Rolling Stones 1966

Mick Jagger song: “And though she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill …” Back then, it was about abuse of benzodiazepines. Today, it is exactly the same with the abuse of depression pills, which have taken over the market of benzodiazepines and even expanded it. But the lyrics are not about depression pills. They are about ADHD drugs, which in rare cases kill children. See lyrics here.

By Peter C Gøtzsche
Institute for Scientific Freedom
Copenhagen

6 October 2023

When the COVID-19 pandemic spread all over the world in early 2020, the Chinese government covered up its origin.^1,2 The Chinese cover up quickly extended to US academics with conflicts of interest, prestigious medical journals, the media, and the key advisor to the US President, Anthony Fauci.

It was an orchestrated effort to hide the obvious, which was too painful to admit, that the pandemic was highly likely caused by a lab leak in Wuhan, and that the virus, SARS-CoV-2, was highly likely manufactured at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.¹ In this lab, researchers take a harmless virus and make it deadly by genetic modification in so-called gain-of-function experiments.

The cover up was highly effective. It shaped the public opinion that the virus had a natural origin and had spread from animals to humans, even though not a single thread of evidence in support of this idea has ever been produced. Chinese censorship and threats against those who knew better¹ won the first round but the game has now been lost. Read full article

A new Report on improving mental health outcomes, a collaboration of scholars, activists, and survivors (James Gottstein, Esq, Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD, David Cohen, PhD, Chuck Ruby, PhD, Faith Myers) demonstrates that the mental health system’s standard interventions (especially overreliance on drugs and incarceration into psychiatric facilities) are harmful, counter-productive, and forced on unwilling patients. These standard interventions turn upside down known facts about what helps people in distress while they violate principles of international law. The authors recommend that People (relationships), Place (safe places to live), and Purpose (meaningful activities), alongside hope, all within a voluntary system of services, should be made broadly available via public and private programs. The authors describe over a dozen currently available approaches embodying these principles, which they suggest would both dramatically improve treatment outcomes and reduce treatment harms.

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.