David Healy

David Healy FRCPsych, a professor of psychiatry at Bangor University in the United Kingdom, is a psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist, scientist and author. His main areas of research are the contribution of antidepressants to suicide, conflict of interest between pharmaceutical companies and academic medicine, and the history of pharmacology. Healy has written more than 150 peer-reviewed articles, 200 other articles, and 20 books, including The Antidepressant Era, The Creation of Psychopharmacology, The Psychopharmacologists Volumes 1–3, Let Them Eat Prozac and Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder.

Healy has been involved as an expert witness in homicide and suicide trials involving psychotropic drugs, and has brought concerns about some medications to the attention of drug regulators. He has also said that pharmaceutical companies sell drugs by marketing diseases and co-opting academic opinion-leaders. In his 2012 book Pharmageddon he argues that pharmaceutical companies have dominated healthcare in America, often with life-threatening results for patients. Healy is a founder and chief executive officer of Data Based Medicine Limited, which aims to make medicines safer through "online direct patient reporting of drug effects".

Career David Healy originally trained in Dublin, Ireland, and at Cambridge University. He is a former Secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology. He is currently a professor of psychiatry at Bangor University in the United Kingdom, a psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist, scientist, and author. His main areas of research are the development and history of psychopharmacology, and the impact of psychotropic drugs on our culture. Healy has written more than 150 peer-reviewed articles, 200 other articles, and 20 books, including The Antidepressant Era and The Creation of Psychopharmacology from Harvard University Press, The Psychopharmacologists Volumes 1–3 and Let Them Eat Prozac from New York University Press, and Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder from Johns Hopkins University Press.

Healy has been involved as a legal expert witness in homicide and suicide trials involving psychotropic drugs, and has brought concerns about some drugs to the attention of American and British regulators. He has alleged that pharmaceutical companies sell drugs by marketing diseases and co-opting academic opinion-leaders, sometimes ghostwriting their articles. His most recent book, Pharmageddon, claims that pharmaceutical companies have dominated healthcare in America, often with life-threatening results for patients. In 2000 a lucrative job at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health was withdrawn under unclear circumstances. Healy and his supporters have claimed that this withdrawal was due to Healy giving a speech and publishing a paper claiming that the SSRI antidepressant fluoxetine increases the risk that patients will commit suicide. Lilly was a major contributor to the Centre at the time. A settlement was reached, in which Healy received a visiting professor appointment, and a joint statement was released stating "Although Dr Healy believes that his clinical appointment was rescinded because of his November 2000 speech at the CAMH [Centre for Addiction and Mental Health], Dr Healy accepts assurances that pharmaceutical companies played no role in either CAMH's decision to rescind his clinical appointment or the University of Toronto's decision to rescind his academic appointment."

Healy directs an Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) clinic in Wales. He strongly defends the procedure as having an immediate visible effect in severely depressed patients for whom no other options have worked, particularly geriatric patients. He has co-written a history of ECT along with Edward Shorter and cites Max Fink as a source. Healy has clarified which chapters he wrote and that he was not personally financially supported by Fink's Scion Foundation. Another reforming psychiatrist, Peter Breggin, has strongly criticised Healy for this aspect of his work on the grounds of ethics and the longer-term data. Healy has even speculated that Insulin coma therapy may have 'worked' in the sense of generating enthusiasm in staff and in an unclear way to challenge anxiety or 'psychosis', despite a lack of, or contrary, evidence from the time. He has also been criticized for portraying psychiatrists as greedy and duped.

Healy is a founder and chief executive officer of Data Based Medicine Limited, which operates through its website RxISK.org, which aims to make medicines safer through "online direct patient reporting of drug effects". Healy sits on the Honorary International Editorial Advisory Board of the Mens Sana Monographs.

In 2020 Healy's book The Decapitation of Care - A Short History of the Rise and Fall of Healthcare was published by Samizdat Health Writers' Co-operative.

Research interests

SSRI antidepressants and suicide In an international review article, Healy (and Aldred) say that the idea that antidepressants might contribute to suicide in depressed patients was first raised in 1958. For 30 years antidepressants were primarily used in severely depressed and often hospitalised patients. The issue of suicidality on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) became one of public concern with reports in 1990 that Prozac could lead to suicidality in patients.

Healy has written many papers and presented many lectures on his view that all SSRI antidepressants – Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft – should show warning labels, as they could "trigger suicidal and violent behavior in some patients".

Conflict of interest Healy says that the pharmaceutical industry has a pervasive influence on academic medicine. Most of the authors published in the Journal of the American Medical Association have received research funding from, or acted as a consultant for, a drug company.

Medical ghostwriting occurs when anonymous scribes with scientific backgrounds are paid to produce reports for publication as if written by better-known experts. Healy estimates that 50 per cent of literature on drugs is ghostwritten/abnormally written. This is an estimate by Healy offered under questioning before the UK House of Commons Health Select Committee investigation. In his thesis, Healy states that ghostwriters write on research given to them by drug companies, which want both positive results and positive research; therefore ghostwriting is biased from the beginning.

Healy allegedly encountered ghost writing involving Wyeth's SNRI Effexor. Healy attended a meeting promoting Effexor, and was offered for his approval a draft article that had been written for him. He left it intact, but made two additions. One contradicted Wyeth's claim that Effexor got patients fully well compared to patients on other SSRIs and another stated that SSRIs could make some individuals suicidal. The article had already been submitted to the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience before Healy saw it again; both of his additions had been removed. In response Healy removed his name from the article.

In the preface of his book Let them Eat Prozac Healy describes the need for a "new contract between society and the pharmaceutical industry – a contract that will require access to the raw data". Healy suggests a new division that can manage the hazards that only becomes visible after products are launched. This new division would be separate from the regulatory bodies and pharmaceutical companies. In "Interface between authorship, industry and science in the domain of therapeutics" a paper of 2003 for The British Journal of Psychiatry, David Healy notes that

"The literature profiles and citation rates of industry-linked and non-industry-linked articles differ. The emerging style of authorship in industry-linked articles can deliver good-quality articles, but it raises concerns for the scientific base of therapeutics … If ghostwriting is an inevitable feature of modern scientific writing, the potential availability of the raw data would do more to ensure a correspondence between those data and a published end result than could be achieved by any other mechanism". In the same book ("Pharmageddon" page 155), Healy states that in the United States, the country that makes the greatest use of the latest pharmaceuticals, life expectancy has been falling progressively further behind other developed countries since the mid-1970s.