Psychiatry’s Mind Control of Our Scientific Media

     Dr. Martin Plöderl is a therapist specializing in suicide prevention and is a member of the Austrian national suicide prevention program. After reviewing the data from the FDA approval trial for the escitalopram, an SSRI for treating generalized anxiety disorder in young children, he realized there was no conclusive evidence that the AbbVie drug was significantly more effective than the placebo, but there was concern about the safety of the drug for this pediatric population.

     The 2023 trial showed that not only did the efficacy of escitalopram for pediatric depression fail to be statistically significant, but it also showed that 9.5% of the young patients taking escitalopram experienced suicidal thoughts. That was seven times more suicidal ideation with escitalopram than with the placebo.
Yet the FDA had approved it.

     As a quick aside, AbbVie, the drug manufacturer, funded the drug’s approval trial and participated in the study’s design, research, analysis, data collection, interpretation of data, reviewing, and approval of the publication. In fact, AbbVie funded and employed most of the trial authors, and three of them were direct employees of AbbVie and six were employees of companies funded by AbbVie. Just sayin’.

     Plöderl brought the questionable trial results to the attention of several esteemed researchers and invited them to summarize these concerns in a concise, scientific way. Joanna Moncrieff, Mark Horowitz, and Florian Naudet, all renowned experts on antidepressants, responded. So did John Warren, who had worked for the UK Medicines Healthcare products Regulatory Agency as an Expert Medical Assessor evaluating new drug applications for the UK and Europe. These were four truly “expert witnesses.”

     Their first short written commentary was rejected without peer review by The Lancet, The Lancet Psychiatry, and BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine. A longer piece written by Plöderl himself was rejected by the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and, after peer review, by European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, as well.

     However, not only did these psychiatric publications refuse to publish these pieces, but psychiatrists began to attack Plöderl in a malicious attempt to sully his reputation. Leading psychiatrists from the UK compared his research on antidepressants to conspiracy theory, called him out for his anti-elite rhetoric, accused him even of climate change denial, and finally – the worst gaslighting accusation possible in today’s world, said he was guilty of “Trumpism.”

     In one article in another scientific journal he and his esteemed associates were accused by one academic psychiatrist of “pseudoscience, self-deception, social activism disguised as science, and opinion-based propaganda.”

     All these accusations came from prominent figures in the field of psychiatry. This is not just censorship. This is not just ignoring inconvenient truths. This is brutal force applied to discrediting a group of experts on antidepressants with enough integrity to try to warn the medical community about the significant danger for children from a drug that the FDA should not have approved.

     This is mind control.