Psychiatrists Aren’t Revealing Their Conflicts of Interest to Patients and Students

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring explains why medical professionals in psychiatry overstate benefits of antidepressant drugs, while minimizing harms including alarming rates of sexual dysfunction:

"If you have ambitions to be a Professor at Yale, Harvard, or one of these big institutions, the way you do that is mostly by getting funding for research. It's by getting a lot of publishing - a lot flying around the world to talk about something. You need all of these things to bolster your reputation as an international expert in this area.

Now, the best way to do that, at least in psychiatry but I suspect in other areas of medicine, is actually to collaborate with pharmaceutical companies to run clinical trials. They write the publications for you - most of it, they do a lot of the grunt work, they give you the protocols, and then, essentially, they fund you and fly you around the place.

And I used to remember, as a junior doctor, looking up to the Professors. And they would say, 'These drugs are safe and effective. There's not a lot of problems there.'

...What I've seen more and more is that they've been compromised, and that they have incentives tied to the money and to career advancement. That means that they can't be as forthright as they ought to be about these things.

And it's gotten to a problem where these are the Professors who are training the doctors who are setting the tone for what is acceptable care out there. And I think that's one of the biggest problems out there." - Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring

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