US senator Charles Grassley (Republican, Iowa) is no Sigmund Freud, but since early this year he has succeeded in putting the psychiatric establishment on the couch. Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate finance committee, has detailed how eight prominent academic researchers (see 'Show me the money') failed to obey rules and report to their universities payments from drug companies, some running into seven figures. Every one of those researchers is a psychiatrist. Grassley has denied singling out psychiatry, and is now demanding that Columbia University in New York produce financial-disclosure documentation for 22 cardiologists. But his revelations - along with his demand this summer that the American Psychiatric Association (APA), based in Arlington, Virginia, document its drug-company income - have created the impression, fair or otherwise, that academic psychiatry is permeated with often-undisclosed drug-company payments, biasing its findings, possibly harming patients and certainly eroding public trust.
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