"In the 1980's and 1990's, as pharmaceutical companies began producing new and more efficacious medications to treat people with serious mental disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, the question arose of how to choose the most appropriate treatment options. Concerns about wide variation in prescribing practices by physicians and complaints from consumer advocates about the negative consequences of this variation spurred the creation of evidence-based guidelines and medication treatment algorithms."
The "Contacts" for the grants listed in the report, were Dr A John Rush, for the University, and Dr Steven Shon for the state of Texas. Shon was fired in October 2006, after the Texas attorney general determined that J&J had improperly influenced him to make Risperdal a preferred drug on TMAP. In 2008, Rush was added to a list of psychiatric academics who failed to disclose all the payments they received from drug companies, by Senator Charles Grassley, as part of an investigation conducted on behalf of the US Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicaid and Medicare spending.
As a main component of the off-label marketing schemes, the lawsuits against the antipsychotic makers allege that the drug companies "seeded" the medical literature with reports and papers purporting to be written by "experts" when they were actually ghostwritten with the names of experts attached after the fact.
In its report on the TMAP grant results, RWJF boasts that: "More than 50 articles on the Texas Medication Algorithm Project have appeared in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Psychiatry Research, Managed Care, Health Services Research, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and other peer-reviewed journals."
"Over the next two years, Project Directors Rush and Shon and their colleagues plan to publish additional articles on other areas of interest," the report said.
On August 18, 2008, a Dallas Morning News headline read: "Conflict of interest fears halt children's mental health project," in reference to the Children's Medication Algorithm Project. "A state mental health plan naming the preferred psychiatric drugs for children has been quietly put on hold over fears drug companies may have given researchers consulting contracts, speakers fees or other perks to help get their products on the list," the News wrote.
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