Daniel Carlat

Daniel Carlat is an American psychiatrist known for his critical stance towards pharmaceutical prescription practices and corporate sponsorship of continuing medical education (CME).

Background Currently, Carlat is a faculty member at Tufts Medical School and serves as the editor of The Carlat Psychiatry Report, a monthly newsletter. In another 2007 article in The Boston Globe, he criticized Massachusetts General Hospital for accepting millions of dollars from drug companies that sponsored continuing medical education courses in psychiatry.

Carlat has also criticized the quality of psychiatric pathophysiology by comparing his field to cardiology, which he argues has a better understanding of how to treat problems using medication. He cites problems such as an inability to directly measure neurotransmitter levels in living patients and a reliance on indirect testing methods (e.g., measuring serotonin based on cerebrospinal fluid samples or during post-mortem studies).