NY Psychiatry Researcher Charged With Embezzlement, Faces Jail Time

retraction watch
Nov 29, 2017

A researcher specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder is facing jail time for allegedly embezzling tens of thousands of dollars of federal grant money.

Yesterday, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) announced criminal charges against Alexander Neumeister, alleging he used the grant funds on trips and meals for family and friends. As the New York Times reported last year, Neumeister was dismissed from his position at New York University (NYU); NYU shut down eight of his studies following an investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which found evidence of lax oversight, falsified records, and inaccurate case histories. 

The U.S. Attorney has also filed a civil lawsuit against Neumeister under the False Claims Act, also for misuse of grant funding. The complaint does not specify the total amount of funds he allegedly misused.

In a statement, Acting U.S. Attorney Joon Kim said Neumeister:

fraudulently charged tens of thousands of dollars in personal expenses as research or school-related expenses. For allegedly betraying the trust of the medical school that employed him and the government institute that funded his research, Neumeister now faces serious federal charges.

Those charges include one count of theft of government funds, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, and one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. In the civil suit, the government can recover three times the alleged damages plus financial penalties for each false claim.
A spokesperson for the OIG told us:

The U.S. Attorney’s Office received an allegation that they looked into. Based on interviews with current and former employees, it was uncovered that some of the test results were skewed and, based on that, the USAO decided to bring charges. Our office is conducting an ongoing investigation in coordination with the USAO.

We asked if this means there is an investigation into research misconduct involving Neumeister; the OIG spokesperson referred us to the US Attorney’s Office. A spokesperson for the US Attorney’s Office said they couldn’t comment further. 

Neumeister was arrested Nov. 21 in Ogdensburg, a New York town on the border with Canada. He’s an Austrian citizen and has surrendered his passport, according to court documents. He has since been released, but his travel is restricted to New York and Connecticut. We contacted the attorney who represented Neumeister in the FDA investigation, but haven’t heard back. 

John Thomas, an attorney at Gentry Locke who is bringing a False Claims Act case against Duke University, told us the Neumeister case is:

…a little bit more than just an embezzlement case. It’s a reminder that universities and principal investigators are stewards of taxpayer dollars.

Neumeister, 51, was principal investigator on several grants issued by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). He has published dozens of papers, one of which was corrected in 2014.
The statement from the US Attorney’s office said that, from 2012 to 2014, Neumeister allegedly used funds from NYU or the NIMH to buy things for his family and a “Friend,” a professional ballet dancer he met in New York in 2012. Items included: 

• airline tickets so that the Friend could travel from Charlotte, North Carolina, or Salt Lake City, Utah, depending on where the Friend was then living, to New York City, where NEUMEISTER was then living;
• airline tickets so that NEUMEISTER could travel from New York City to Charlotte and Salt Lake City to visit the Friend, as well as lodging, bar tabs, meals and other travel-related expenses associated with this travel;
• an all-expense paid trip to Miami Beach for the Friend, during which the Friend was given authorization by NEUMEISTER to use NEUMEISTER’s [credit card] to pay for food, beverages, and beach facilities;
• an iPhone for the friend; and
• airline tickets so that NEUMEISTER’s spouse could travel from Newark, New Jersey, to Vienna, Austria, to attend a family event.

The statement alleges:

In addition, NEUMEISTER falsely claimed that the Friend was a research study participant in studies that NEUMEISTER was overseeing for the School, and caused the School to pay over $10,000 of the School’s own funds directly to the Friend.  

The civil complaint said that NYU confronted Neumeister in 2015 about the credit card expenditures after it had conducted an audit. Whether the audit was routine or triggered by something else isn’t clear. 

The complaints — also covered by the New York Daily News — note that Neumeister offered to pay back the allegedly misappropriated funds, but never did.

The FCA suit includes many of the same allegations.
Neumeister’s LinkedIn page says that he’s currently a program director for research supported by the World Health Organization in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A spokesperson for the NYU School of Medicine told us:

As soon as the potential issues specific to this research were identified and reviewed, findings were shared with the appropriate oversight agencies. The researcher is no longer employed at the School of Medicine.

NYU added:

As a victim of Dr. Neumeister’s actions, as to which NYU School of Medicine may be called to give testimony or further information, it would be inappropriate to provide additional comment while the federal investigation is ongoing.

Thomas said that this case, and the FCA case that Columbia University settled last year for $9.5 million over problematic costs arising out of grant, could be the beginning of a trend:

It shows the Southern District of New York is paying close attention to grant fraud.

Hat tip: Theresa Defino

Like Retraction Watch? Consider making a tax-deductible contribution to support our growth. You can also follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, sign up on our homepage for an email every time there’s a new post, or subscribe to our daily digest. Click here to review our Comments Policy. For a sneak peek at what we’re working on, click here. If you have comments or feedback, you can reach us at retractionwatchteam@gmail.com.


Thank You Retraction Watch. 


What do you expect from an Industry that charges the tax payers for it to Ideate?

Focus on Psychiatry: 7 From Mad In America

madinamerica

Study Examines Experience of Long Term Antidepressant Use

Many Psychiatric Patients Sent Home With Multiple Antipsychotics Against Guidelines

Columbia University Psychiatrist, Named Director of NIMH

Researchers Investigate Antidepressant Induced Suicidal Ideation

Study Finds Improved Functioning For 'Schizophrenia' Without Antipsychotics

More Children Receiving ‘Off-Label’ Antipsychotics for ‘ADHD’

Most People with Common ‘Mental Disorders’ Get Better Without Treatment, Study Finds

Thank you MIA.

It didn't take us long on the new NIMH Director.

Columbia University Psychiatrist, Named Director of NIMH

http://profiles.columbiapsychiatry.org/profile/jagordon

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

• University of California San Francisco School of Medicine

Another Alumnus of Illuminati U.

Dr. FG Lu Is An Illuminati: And Yes, He's Serious

NOS: 'Not Otherwise Specified' Diagnoses Rose To 50% From 2007-2010

In English? "Duh, We Don't Know", but the consumer gets screwed with their disgusting stench for Life anyway.

PubMed

National Trends in Psychiatric Not Otherwise Specified (NOS) Diagnosis and Medication Use Among Adults in Outpatient Treatment.

Rajakannan T¹, Safer DJ¹, Burcu M¹, Zito JM¹.

Author information

·         ¹Dr. Rajakannan, Mr. Burcu, and Dr. Zito are with the Department of Pharmaceutical Health Services Research, University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, Baltimore. Dr. Zito is also with the Department of Psychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore. Dr. Safer is with the Department of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore. Send correspondence to Dr. Safer (e-mail: dsafer@jhmi.edu ).

Abstract

OBJECTIVE:

This study examined national trends between 1999 and 2010 in not otherwise specified (NOS) DSM-IV psychiatric diagnoses and in related medication treatment patterns reported for adults during outpatient physician office visits.

METHODS:

Data on physician office visits by adults (ages 18-64) with a psychiatric diagnosis were from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (1999-2010) (N=52,026). Trends for visits with full-criteria diagnoses compared with visits with NOS diagnoses were analyzed for major psychiatric diagnostic groups, physician specialty, and prescribed medications. Population weighted chi square and logistic regression analyses were utilized.

RESULTS:

Between 1999-2002 and 2007-2010, the proportion of all mental health visits by adults to office-based physicians that involved an NOS diagnosis increased significantly, from 42% to 50% (p<.001). Significant proportional increases in NOS diagnoses included bipolar disorders NOS (5% to 55%), anxiety disorders NOS (50% to 62%), and mood disorders NOS (.4% to 1.8%). In 2007-2010, NOS visits accounted for a greater proportion of visits to nonpsychiatrists than to psychiatrists (61% and 35%, respectively). Psychotropic medications prescribed during visits increased over time for both full-criteria and NOS diagnoses, but the increase was greater for NOS visits, specifically for antipsychotics, anticonvulsants-mood stabilizers, and lithium. By 2007-2010, psychotropic monotherapy and multidrug regimens were comparable for full-criteria and NOS diagnoses.

CONCLUSIONS:

The proportion of U.S. physician visits with an NOS psychiatric diagnosis increased to nearly 50% in 2007-2010. The increase raises concerns about the precision of psychiatric diagnoses in community care and about the impact on concomitant medication regimens.

 
"The increase raises concerns about the precision of psychiatric diagnoses"

But 50% is still not enough to Do anything about Stopping it.

At what point does the maggot gag?

Stench And The City: San Francisco/UCSF's 'Sanctuary City' Summer Of Urine

Yes, it does stink and in more ways than one, and it is not going to stop stinking until a new President appoints and the Senate confirms a U.S. Attorney General whose not a party hack to roll up their sleeves and get inside the SF/UCSF 'We Need More Disposable People for our Federally Funded Psychiatric Machine To Eat'.

townhall
Debra J. Saunders | Aug 09, 2015

How bad is the urine situation in San Francisco? This is not a joke: Monday night, a light pole corroded by urine collapsed and crashed onto a car, narrowly missing the driver. The smell is worse than I have known since I started working for The Chronicle in 1992. It hits your nose on the BART escalator before you reach Market Street. That sour smell can bake for blocks where street people sleep wrapped in dirty blankets. I talked to Mayor Ed Lee and rode around with police to find out what can be done to clean up San Francisco.

Why does the city stink so? With the drought there has been less rain to wash away the city's sins. Prosperity has produced a building boom -- so there are fewer vacant spaces where the homeless can burrow.

I asked Lee Wednesday why other cities seem so much cleaner than San Francisco. "I think they enjoy serious winters," Lee answered -- cold weather can drive street people to easier climates. Ess Eff doesn't have really cold weather: "We're a year-round attraction for various lifestyles."

Lee said things I didn't think I'd hear a San Francisco mayor ever say. Like: "I do think that people are being somewhat more irresponsible." (Remember: The first step in solving a problem is to recognize that it exists.) And: "It's not so much the urination," but "historic levels of drug use."

Changes in California law and policy mean that offenses that once rated as felonies are now misdemeanors. Police can't lock up drug users as they once did. Prisons and jails are releasing inmates who, Lee added, haven't worked through their "bad habits."

This year, Hizzoner has ramped up public restroom access. Newly staffed Pit Stop public toilets have decreased requests for sidewalk steam cleaning in the Tenderloin. They've put a pissoir in Dolores Park. The mayor has budgeted more money for Department of Public Works cleanup crews and for housing to improve the lot of 500 homeless families at a time. The new Navigation Center in the Mission has drawn chronic homeless who resisted programs because they refused to part with their pets and possessions. Last year, the board of supervisors adopted a version of Laura's Law that allows authorities to compel the mentally ill to accept outpatient treatment. Still, Lee warned, better bathroom facilities won't necessarily change the habits of street people who "can't even make a rational decision because they're so drugged out."

I saw proof of the street drug problem later that morning as I went for a ride with San Francisco Police Lt. Mike Nevin and Sgt. Joe McCloskey who patrol the homeless beat. We had traveled one whole block when we came across a couple passed out in an alleyway with a small pack of dogs -- one was their dog, two belonged to a friend. The woman said they'd been living at a nearby homeless hotel, but got evicted for failure to pay a week's rent. I saw caps from syringes and small plastic bags used for heroin. A Homeless Outreach Team soon arrived to see what services the couple needed. A Department of Public Works truck came to pick up unattended mattresses, blankets and backpacks.

Later we drove to King Street, to a stretch of unused road turned homeless encampment. Enterprising street people had hooked into electricity -- there were dozens of cords plugged into power strips; someone had tampered with a fire hydrant for water (but now city workers say it has to be fixed before it can be used to put out a fire). There were couches, expensive-looking tents and piles of refuse. I saw a Vespa and at least a dozen bicycles. Spying a cache of bike frames, McCloskey suspects a chop shop. Another officer opines, "If you are a drug addict, you are going to come to San Francisco."

Across an overpass, I see new condos -- a two-bedroom unit is for sale for $1.5 million. As the city gets smellier and scarier, I wonder, how many suckers can one city find to pay that kind of money in a neighborhood so clearly on the edge?

By now, most of the two-dozen or so King Street squatters have taken off. Two remaining, still packing up stuff, tell me they have spent a month there. A man named Brian from New Orleans says he came to San Francisco four years ago. He spent three days on King Street. "I love the city." Of course, he does.

"All we are really is a nuisance to them," McCloskey says. Later he tells me, he's great at clearing blocks, but that only moves the homeless to a different place.

I have just finished reading a June 2015 U.C. Berkeley Law School Clinic report, "Punishing the Poorest: How the Criminalization of Homelessness Perpetuates Poverty in San Francisco." The authors maintain that San Francisco "is responding to homelessness with a punitive fist." Punitive? As in tough? The report cites laws against overnight camping and lying on public sidewalks, as well as drug possession or alcohol consumption in public places. Such laws are Jim Crow 2015, according to the report; the term "quality of life" is an "offensive misnomer" that works against "poor people, people of color, and homeless people who are disproportionately impacted by these laws." In short, if street people are self-destructive and anti-social, it's because of the police.

I have to laugh because Lt. Nevin sounds like a social worker. He makes a lot of the same points as the Berkeley report. You can't expect drug addicts to get clean without providing housing first, he says. And: "It doesn't do any good to cite somebody and then run into them a week later and cite them again." He wants more resources, like the Navigation Center, which take the time needed to steer the chronic homeless into the right programs.

There's one point in the U.C. Berkeley report that does strike a chord -- the argument that many SFPD actions just don't work. Move a homeless man, and he just goes elsewhere, not into housing. The cycle of citations doesn't work because street people don't pay fines. Take away someone's driver license for not paying fines and he or she can't get to work. Arresting drug users is futile, I gather, because misdemeanors mean little more than a short stint in jail -- hours maybe. Report ethnographer Chris Herring interviewed homeless people who told him arrests were turnaround events that resulted in, maybe, a night in jail, if that. At most, a weekend.

"I do find it cruel to say it's unacceptable to camp in San Francisco," Herring told me over the phone. On principle, I have no problem with police citing street people for squatting on and trashing public spaces. That's vandalism. But if citations don't work, that bothers me. Maybe there are things SFPD should be doing less, because they don't work. Or things they should do more to improve -- I'll say it -- San Francisco's "quality of life." If you think "quality of life" is a slur, you're part of the problem.

San Francisco is an affluent and vibrant city. It shouldn't smell like stale piss.

Thank You Ms Saunders and Townhall.

A large part of San Francisco's affluence and vibrancy is OPM knowingly buying 'the smell of stale piss', . . . an inseperable concomitant of any army of Drug Pushers.

Cleaning up this Urban Nose Sore is going to take more than empty promises from it to quit being a Sanctuary City. 

It's going to take a major house cleaning at NIH and the closure of NIMH to stop funding SF's never ending Summer of Urine.

Feds Drop $52,293 To Reduce Discrimination Against LGBT Schizophrenics By Convenience Store Clerks

weaselzippers;

Via CNS News:

The National Institutes of Health through its National Institute of Mental Health has awarded $52,293 in taxpayer funding to the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to study how to reduce discrimination of lesbian, gay and transgender people with schizophrenia by members of the community they are in frequent contact with, like the “convenience store clerk.”

“Inquiry will extend from individuals with schizophrenia to include family members and service providers of participants as well as community members with whom they are in frequent contact (e.g., convenience store clerk),” the grant, titled “Defining Community for LGBT People with Schizophrenia,” stated.

“Sexual and gender minority individuals with severe mental illness (SMI) are amongst the most marginalized individuals in North American society,” the grant stated. “They face multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination that compound the effects of having a major mental illness, hampering recovery and frustrating efforts to meaningfully participate in our communities.”

“Our work will lay the groundwork for our developing a better understanding about how we can reduce that discrimination in community contexts and develop interventions to facilitate community participation among sexual and gender minority individuals with severe mental illness,” it stated.

Thank You CNS and Zip.

And of course, this initial 52K will open the door - since it won't produce any satisfactory answers for the Diversity Mob - to blow it into an ongoing 20 year funding sink costing hundreds of millions, with still no satisfactory answers for the Diversity Mob.

Except, of course, to demonize the convenience store as a hate monger, and target them for future Diversity Mob violence.

Look at the pic again. Don't you think convenience store owners already have enough crap to deal with?

The fault isn't theirs. The fault is the Diversity Mob's, and their Psychiatric Stigma and Brain Damage peddlers.

But then again, this is what the Diversity Mob wants.

Demonize the Store Owner/Worker, Socialism's never ending, 24/7 Class Warfare.

We're seeing it happen to Police Depts already. The method is to set everybody at everybody else's throat, declare them incompetent, and have the Federal Govt. move in and take over.

“Our work will lay the groundwork for our developing a better understanding about how we can reduce that discrimination in community contexts and develop interventions to facilitate community participation among sexual and gender minority individuals with severe mental illness,” it stated."

Bullshit. 

Their Work will be more of the same 100% Incompetent Crap the 'Mental Health' con artists have been inflicting on the world since their inception. 

NIMH Appoints High-Profile ECT Proponent to Key Directorship

Our position on the NIMH remains that it has no legal basis for existing. It needs to be de-funded, everyone working there fired, and the buildings sold at public auction.

ECT: Cost/Benefit Analysis So Poor, It's Use Cannot Be Justified

http://www.ect.org/resources/machines.html


madinamerica;

The US National Institute of Mental Health has appointed psychiatrist Sarah Hollingsworth Lisanby to the role of director of its Division of Translational Research. Lisanby holds "key leadership" positions in organizations that promote the use of electro-convulsive therapy, noted an NIMH press release, and she will now oversee $400 million in research funding into the biological causes and treatments of mental illnesses.

Lisanby is President for the Association for Convulsive Therapy/International Society of Neurostimulation and the International Society for Transcranial Stimulation, and is also Chair of the American Psychiatric Association Task Force to Revise the Practice on Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), stated the press release. It does not mention that in 2008 the FDA cited Lisanby for numerous ethical violations and safety compliance lapses in a clinical trial she was leading -- the trial involved a "device" for which identifying information is censored on the FDA website. In 2011, Lisanby testified during FDA hearings that she believed safety restrictions on electroshock devices should be loosened.

In her new role with NIMH, Lisanby will "help set a national agenda for research on mental illness," stated the press release.

Inspections, Compliance, Enforcement, and Criminal Investigations: Lisanby, Sarah H., M.D. 6-Oct-08 (Food and Drug Administration, October 6, 2008)

Dr. Sarah Lisanby on ECT (PsychCentral, retrieved on March 12, 2015)

Duke University psychiatrist Sarah Hollingsworth Lisanby, M.D. will join NIMH in Fall 2015 (NIMH press release, March 4, 2015)

--Rob Wipond, News Editor

This entry was posted in Featured News, In the News and tagged Google News. Bookmark the permalink.

RELATED POSTS

People Hear Voices of Many Different QualitiesMarch 19, 2015

Fluoridated Water Linked With Higher ADHD RatesMarch 18, 2015

Self-regulation of Pharma Drug Advertising Failing in UK and SwedenMarch 16, 2015

Some Common Psychiatric Medications Associated With PneumoniaMarch 16, 2015

Damages From Endocrine-disrupting Chemicals Costing Hundreds of Billions AnnuallyMarch 12, 2015

Thank You Mr Wipond and MIA.

Wasted! Feds Spend Millions Getting Monkeys Drunk

Monkeys again as research subjects/models of Human behavior. This is what 'Behavioral Science' thinks of Americans. Monkeys. 

weaselzippers;

Via Washington Times:

There’s a whole lot of drinking going on in the name of government science, and some watchdogs think it’s the American taxpayer who is getting hammered.

Right now the National Institutes of Health is spending $3.2 million to get monkeys to drink alcohol excessively to determine what effect it has long term on their body tissue.

NIH also has handed out $69,459 to the University of Missouri to study whether text messaging college students before they attend pre-football game tailgates will encourage them to drink less and “reduce harmful effects related to alcohol consumption.”

And the government’s premier research arm has doled out money in recent years for research on binge-drinking mice, inebriated gamblers and pilots seeking the sensation of flying drunk — on a simulator of course.

NIH defends such expenditures on the grounds that these research projects help those they fund improve their “potential to develop into a productive, independent research scientist.”

Keep reading…

Thank You Wash Times and Nickarama. 



"these research projects help those they fund improve their “potential to develop into a productive, independent research scientist.”"

Like This NIH/NIMH Monkey Research Project helped develop productive, independent research.

National Institute of Mental Health: Violence Initiative: Junk Medicine In Jackboots

Does NIMH Follow The Rules of Science? A Startling Study (Hint: Science? BwaHaHaHa)

This entire article by Dr. McLaren, word for word, merits everyone's undivided attention despite our highlighting a few phases here and there.

Mad In America has;
Does NIMH Follow The Rules of Science? A Startling Study

6

Niall McLaren

July 9, 2013

Just as the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) long-delayed DSM5 was about to launch, the director of NIMH, Dr Thomas Insel, provoked a flurry of acrimony when he mentioned in his blog that his organisation intended to move away from the ideas behind DSM: “Patients with mental disorders deserve better… NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories… we will be supporting research projects that look across current categories – or sub-divide current categories – to begin to develop a better system”¹. It now seems Insel’s comments had more to do with NIMH funding needs than points of principle. After a bit of scuffling behind the scenes, NIMH and APA settled their differences² and the DSM party went ahead. However, the affair raises a critically important issue in psychiatry

Over the past few years, NIMH has undertaken a carefully directed campaign to garner support for its new Research Domain Criteria project (RDoC). This consists of a determined effort to cast the whole of mental disorder as a problem of brain pathology: “First, the RDoC framework conceptualizes mental illnesses as brain disorders… Second, (it) assumes that the dysfunction in neural circuits can be identified with the tools of clinical neuroscience…. Third, (it) assumes that data from genetics and clinical neuroscience will yield biosignatures that will augment clinical symptoms and signs for clinical management.”³. The whole project is very long term and even initial results are not expected in under a decade but the authors were convinced of its direction: “Our expectation, based on experience in cancer, heart disease, and infectious diseases, is that identifying syndromes based on pathophysiology will eventually be able to improve outcomes.” Clearly, the validity of these three base assumptions is critical to the success of the RDoC program.

As outlined in this and a considerable number of other papers in a wide variety of journals, the RDoC program will consume the majority of NIMH budgets for many years to come. It will dominate  research in mental disorder, shifting efforts away from matters of psychology to fundamental brain processes. One would therefore expect that the theoretical orientation underlying such a massive expenditure of public money, not to mention the lives of the mentally-troubled and the careers of a generation of professionals, would have been charted in very precise detail.

However, in checking a list of these papers, something became very obvious. The papers were written by a group of the most senior officers of NIMH, supported by the APA and WHO. They were also placed in a broad range of non-psychiatric journals, including Nature and the abstruse Journal of Clinical Investigations, as though aimed at the broadest possible medical/biological audience. The most remarkable feature, though, was the complete absence of anything that would amount to a justification of the (many) authors’ fundamental claim, that a full understanding of the brain will give a full understanding of mental disorder, with no questions unanswered. These papers give the strong impression that they were designed to sway opinion by appeals to authority rather than to convince by weight of evidence from the literature. This, of course, is the exact antithesis of the scientific method.

For any field that claims to be scientific, there are certain fundamental and inviolate rules to follow. They tell us where we can look, what counts as evidence, what procedures are acceptable, and so on. And one of the most important rules of all is this: In science, there is no such thing as a final authority. Where there is uncertainty, we can say that the weight of scientific opinion favours this or that conclusion but the unwavering basis of empirical science is that any opinion can be overturned by further evidence. That’s what empirical means. So in such an important matter, the future direction of the next thirty or forty years of psychiatric research, one would expect that nothing would be left to chance. Every effort should be made to ensure that, given our present state of knowledge, the validity of the chosen path is beyond question. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

My preliminary survey showed that not one of the many authors (e.g.; reference [³] has nine) cited anything that would amount to a justification of the basic, biological claim. This struck me as bizarre, so I rechecked the dozen or so NIMH papers, then followed each author back through the literature for about ten years, but still there was nothing. It seems that, among our ‘key opinion leaders’, the question of the ultimate nature of mental disorder is regarded as settled: it is biological, and the ordinary “…tools of clinical neuroscience, including electrophysiology, functional neuroimaging, and … data from genetics…” will tell us everything we need to know. But where is the proof?

Perhaps we should just accept this and go with the flow, as they say, but I had experience of something similar in the past. In 1998, I published a paper which showed that George Engel’s so-called ‘biopsychosocial model,’ beloved of British, Canadian and Australian psychiatrists, didn’t exist. Alerted by the way everybody used the term but nobody ever provided proper references, I trolled through practically everything Engel had ever written, plus dozens of papers that cited him, to find that he had never written the model at all. It is an urban myth so, as a justification for what psychiatrists do, it has all the authority of a fond dream. Perhaps the claims of biological psychiatrists were of the same order, a self-reinforcing belief that had simply become part of the wallpaper in the world of psychiatry, handed from generation to generation just as we hand on our notion of what is the best football team. I decided to search the literature methodically to see if anybody had ever provided anything to justify the NIMH stance.

A PubMed search yielded nothing of interest, so I searched the contents of the major English language journals for the eleven years January 2001 to December 2011, looking for papers that could possibly provide a formal justification of the claims of biological psychiatry. The task of systematically searching every paper published in that period is beyond an individual, and would constitute a serious drain on the resources of even a hundred people. I started with thirteen journals but dispensed with two of them straight away (the Canadian and Australasian journals) as I know they do not publish this kind of material. Full details of the remaining eleven journals are given in the paper⁴. Through a friend, I was able to obtain copies of anything interesting that was not in those journals so my coverage, while not entirely systematic, was exhaustive – and exhausting. By the end, I was doing little more than staring glassy-eyed at the thousands of pages of basic biological research.

In eleven years, these journals published some 19,234 original research papers, reviews, surveys, editorials, opinions and commentaries, filling something like 154,000 pages of 1465 issues. This did not include correspondence, historical or other topics as they seemed unlikely to be the bearers of monumental news. And be in no doubt: a proof of the claim that biology is all in mental disorder would be monumental, on a par with any major scientific discovery in the past few centuries. Trouble is, I found nothing in this extensive search of the literature that could be taken as a justification of the notion that mental disorder is fundamentally biological in nature. As of 2013, the whole edifice of orthodox or mainstream psychiatry rests on a mantra, something that has the form of a scientific statement but is factually empty, devoid of content. Instead of Insel’s claim that mental disorder can be seen as a form of brain pathology, only this fact has been established: There is nothing in the recent psychiatric literature that amounts to a formal, articulated, publically available, tested and proven biological model of mental disorder.

I concluded that the notion of biological psychiatry is no more than an ideology, supported by people who believe fervently in its truth but who cannot prove their beliefs: “As they stand, these papers represent firmly-held, highly partisan opinions with no convincing basis. They use rhetorical language to present an excessively simplified and one-sided view of a complex question in such a manner as to induce people to think that the matter has been resolved when, in fact, it has not. That is, while failing the criteria for scientific literature, they satisfy the definition of propaganda”⁴. Essentially, biological psychiatry is an urban myth.

Where does this leave us? Throughout the world, hundreds of millions of people are being “treated” according to a model of mental disorder that doesn’t exist. Moreover, the psychiatric establishment that controls the flow of research money has decided to commit it to a direction that lacks anything like a scientific warrant. We can be sure that junior researchers will dance to their tune on the basis that anything so important as the nature of mental disorder will surely have been sorted out by their elders and betters. They may point to the opinions of, say, the neurophysiologist, Eric Kandel⁵ but nothing could be further from the truth.⁶

The burden of proof of the claims of biological psychiatry rests with those who make them. In the absence of proof, we can say that mainstream psychiatry has failed its most basic scientific duty. I seriously doubt that there has ever been anything quite like it in the history of western science.

References:

1 Insel TR, 2013. NIMH Director’s Blog: Transforming Diagnosis. April 29, 2013. At .

2 Lieberman J, 2013. DSM5: Setting the Record Straight. Medscape, May 2013. (online by subscription).

3 Insel TR et al,  2010. Research Domain Criteria (RDoC): Toward a New Classification Framework for Research on Mental Disorders. Amer J Psychiat 167: 748-751

4 McLaren N, 2013 Psychiatry as Ideology. Ethical Human Psychol Psychiat 15: 1-11.

5 Kandel ER, 2005. Psychiatry, psychoanalysis and the new biology of mind. Washington: APA Publishing.

6 McLaren N, 2008. Kandel’s ‘New Science of Mind’ for Psychiatry and the limits to biological reductionism: a critical review. Ethical Human Psychol Psychiat; 10: 109-121. Expanded version: Defining limits to biological psychiatry. Ch. 1. of McLaren N, 2009. Humanizing Psychiatry: The Biocognitive Model. Ann Arbor, Mi.: Future Psychiatry Press.

Niall McLaren

Jock McLaren is an Australian psychiatrist who worked 25yrs in the remote north of the country. He occupies himself delving into the philosophical basis of psychiatry, only to find there isn’t one. This has not helped his popularity with his colleagues, now well into negative territory.

related posts:

• NIMH’s First Follow-Up Study
• NIMH’s Insel Doubles Back on
  Backing Away from DSM-5
• The Myth of Mental Illness Revisited, NIMH Style
• Spinning Straw into Gold:
  When Science Becomes Fiction
• Saving Science: It’s Time to Solve Publication Bias

Thank You Dr. McLaren and madinamerica.