Barry Blackwell’s Pioneers and Controversies in Psychopharmacology
Samuel Gershon’s comments on Chapter 19 (The End of the Beginning: The Beginning of the End? Corporate Corruption in the Psychopharmaceutical Industry – Revised)

         The material you have been presenting is very important and very necessary. However, I regret that the medical schools are now contributing to the degradation of the educational process, i.e., physician’s time is scheduled by a central office so that clinical instruction in that setting is diminished, they trim the curriculum to save teaching time, e.g., in some schools teaching on clozapine and lithium is dropped because it involves too much time with medical monitoring. My pet problem, however, is the financial constraints on journal publication, in our case with the International Journal of Bipolar Disorders. The publisher gradually removed all support for the office staff of two (Gin and Roy) and then, sincethey did not wish to pay rent for the office or equipment, all work was to be conducted “at home” without help. The publisher also requested that “the journal” write to all authors whose publication was rejected indicating that the paper could be resubmitted to the publishers for consideration and if accepted a publication fee would be charged. This same process is in operation for molecular psychiatry, too. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex fears have been more fully implemented by the Academic-medical-pharma and  scientific journal complex. Be assured that this is a functionally and financial integration.

September 6, 2018