Leemon McHenry

The lingering controversy concerning the usefulness and safety of antidepressants for children and adolescents is likely to confuse clinicians. Recent papers perpetuate the claim that antidepressants are shown to be safe and effective in randomised controlled trials. Others claim that antidepressants have been shown to prevent suicides. In this editorial we address the manipulation of outcomes that result from academics’ alliance with industry. We explain how industry and key opinion leaders have distorted the clinician’s perception of the safety and usefulness of antidepressants for the treatment of depression in children and adolescents through publication bias, poor methodology, and selective reporting.

The specific type of irrationality known as akrasia or weakness of the will has been a subject of vigorous debate ever since Plato in his Protagoras had Socrates defend the thesis that "no one willingly does wrong." Against Socrates and many contemporary thinkers on the subject, Mele attempts to vindicate akrasia as a genuine possibility. As he explores the theoretical labyrinth, his view emerges as rich in philosophic insight and experimental data from psychological research, the latter of which he uses effectively in showing the way out of a number of paradoxes.

The argument of this book is the culmination of the author’s work that has been under way since the 1970s, and it brings together a wealth of ideas from his earlier books, What’s Wrong with Science?, From Knowledge to Wisdom, The Comprehensibility of the Universe, and The Human World and the Physical Universe. There are fine tunings of points and discussion of cutting-edge developments in physics that provide an excellent update to his views. Maxwell also explains the basic principles of the theory he espouses, namely, “aim-oriented empiricism.”

In his vigorous defense of the reality of time, Capek champions a tradition of process philosophy that includes such figures as Bergson, James, and Whitehead, against both philosophers and physicists that subordinate time to some lower status in reality or regard it as a peculiar dimension of space. This is, in fact, the point of his last essay in this volume, "Time-Space Rather than Space-Time," where he argues, contrary to standard interpretations, that relativity physics does not necessitate a frozen "block universe" that includes preexisting future events.

This chapter of Victor Lowe's Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Volume II: 1910-1947 covers the development of Whitehead's philosophy of physics while he was Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Imperial College, London. Under the influence of Einstein's theory of relativity, Whitehead developed a theory of extension that explained the basis of the space-time manifold in terms of an ontology of events. Pan-physics was his term for the unification of the natural sciences as one general science.

Als sich die Denkschulen der anglo-amerikanischen Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts formierten, wurden Whitehead und Russell zu Symbolfiguren der spekulativen Denkrichtung auf der einen und der analytischen Ansätze auf der anderen Seite. Der eine beschäftigte sich mit der Konstruktion einer umfassenden Metaphysik; der andere betonte das Streben nach begrifflicher Klarheit mit den Mitteln präziser logischer und linguistischer Analyse. Die antithetische Beziehung dieser beiden widerstreitenden Parteien ist allerdings weniger offensichtlich, wenn wir die Ziele in den Blick nehmen, die Whitehead und Russell teilten, unmittelbar nachdem sie in ihrem Monumentalwerk Principia Mathematica an den Grundlagen der Mathematik zusammengearbeitet hatten. Beide waren nun mit einem anderen grundlegenden Projekt der Philosophie der Physik befasst. Whitehead und Russell entwickelten, als offensichtlichste Konsequenz aus den revolutionären Fortschritten der modernen Physik, jeder für sich eine Ereignisontologie, doch waren sie unterschiedlicher Ansicht darüber, wie diese Ontologie als metaphysische Grundlage der Physik zu interpretieren sei. Das Ziel meines Essays ist es daher, die Affinitäten und Gegensätze in Whiteheads und Russells Ansichten darüber herauszuarbeiten, wie das ausgedehnte Universum, bestehend aus Materie und „leerem“ Raum, als eine Mannigfaltigkeit von Ereignissen zu denken sei. Ich zeige außerdem, wie viel von Russells Metaphysik von Whiteheads früher Arbeit beeinflusst war. Während Russell selbst diesen Einfluss großzügig anerkannte, wird er von Kommentatoren seiner Philosophie selten zur Kenntnis genommen.

Journals are failing in their obligation to ensure that research is fairly represented to their readers, and must act decisively to retract fraudulent publications. Recent case reports have exposed how marketing objectives usurped scientific testing and compromised the credibility of academic medicine. But scant attention has been given to the role that journals play in this process, especially when evidence of research fraud fails to elicit corrective measures. Our experience with The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP) illustrates the nature of the problem. The now-infamous Study 329 of paroxetine in adolescent depression was negative for efficacy on all eight protocol-specified outcomes and positive for harm, but JAACAP published a report of this study that concluded that “paroxetine is generally well tolerated and effective for major depression in adolescents.” The journal’s editors not only failed to exercise critical judgment in accepting the paper, but when shown evidence that the paper misrepresented the science, refused either to convey this information to the medical community or to retract the article.

U svom remek- djelu, Proces i realnost (1929.), s podnaslovom Rasprava s područja kozmologije, Whitehead se bavio kozmologijom kao dijelom svoje opće metafizike procesa. Metafizika traga za najopćenitijim načelima realnosti. Kako je rekao, »to je znanost koja želi otkriti opće ideje koje su neophodne za analizu svega što se zbiva « (RM 84). Metafizika stoga traga za načelima koja su nužna u svim mogućim svjetovima ili kozmičkim epohama, a kozmologija otkriva pomoću promatranja onoga što su primjeri za naš aktualni svijet ili ovu kozmičku epohu.

Traditionally, the three-pronged mission of our colleges and universities has been to provide high-quality education, encourage cutting-edge research, and promote professional and community service. The substitution of business-based policies for sound academic principles, however, has institutionalized a form of professional inequality that threatens all three. The growing distinction between tenured and tenure-track faculty members on the one hand and tenure-ineligible lecturers or part-time adjuncts on the other has produced an academic caste system that is undermining the raison d’être of our institutions of higher learning. This system is capricious, discriminatory, and unjust.

The goal of this paper is to expose the research misconduct of pharmaceutical industry-sponsored clinical trials via three short case studies of corrupted psychiatric trials that were conducted in the United States. We discuss the common elements that enable the misrepresentation of clinical trial results including ghostwriting for medical journals, the role of key opinion leaders as co-conspirators with the pharmaceutical industry and the complicity of top medical journals in failing to uphold standards of science and peer review. We conclude that the corruption of industry-sponsored clinical trials is one of the major obstacles facing evidence-based medicine.

This paper is a deconstruction of a ghostwritten report of a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled efficacy and safety trial of citalopram in depressed children and adolescents conducted in the United States. Court documents revealed that protocol-specified outcome measures showed no statistically significant difference between citalopram and placebo. However, the published article concluded that citalopram was safe and significantly more efficacious than placebo for children and adolescents, with possible adverse effects on patient safety.