Dear Mr Lichtenstein,

I posted this earlier in another post and sent an email to your show's address. Maybe you received it. In all this discussion about conflicts of interest I think everyone is glosssing over the innaccuracies of the show. Below are some comments from the guests and hosts that are at odds with the scientific literature.

Andrew Leuchter: “In those studies where this increase[d] thoughts about suicide and agitation were noted, actually, there were no suicides - that people thought about it but they didn’t act on it.”

This is a problematic statement. For instance in 1991 Glaxo submitted an analysis and reported that there were five suicides in the drug group. People might argue about the statistical significance compared to the placebo group but at least according to the FDA and Glaxo he has misspoken. What he most likely meant to say was that there were no reported suicides in the studies looking at the use of antidepressants in children. However even this is problematic as the case of Traci Johnson shows.

Goodwin: “There is no credible scientific evidence linking antidepressants to suicide or violence.”

This is a rather flippant statement about a large body of data, and again at odds with the FDA, as presumably the FDA believes that their decision to place a box warning on the SSRIs was based on an analysis of the scientific evidence. Goodwin not might agree with the data, but according to Healy (Lines of Evidence, 2003) there were more suicides and more thoughts about suicide in the trials for every single antidepressant studied. In the Zoloft group there were two suicides and in the Paxil group there were five, and the list goes on.

I think someone from your show needs to comment on these factual errors. If you need supporting documents I would be happy to send them to you.

Iit is unclear to me how you decided to have a show made up of experts who disagree with the FDA and you never considered having someone from the other side. How did this happen?

It is also odd that in your letter about Jeanne Lenzer and the BMJ having to retract their report that Lilly hid documents you provide a link to an article that shows Lilly knew about problems with Prozac. (The retraction was not about whether or not Lilly had internal documents suggesting that there was a problem with Prozac but whether or not they made the documents available to lawyers in a specific case. They did not make the documents available to the genral public)According to the very article which you cite,

"The London-based BMJ, formerly called the British Medical Journal, did not retract its contention that the documents show the antidepressant is linked to increased risk of suicide or violence. All we have retracted is the statement that these documents went missing," wrote acting editor Kamram Abbasi, in an e-mail to CNN. " -Jon Leo