January 15, 2019
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF MENTAL HEALTH URGED TO PRIORITIZE STUDY OF TREATMENTS FOR SCHIZOPHRENIA
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA - Today, several psychiatric researchers that serve on the Treatment Advocacy Center board of directors, including E. Fuller Torrey, MD, published an article in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry criticizing the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for markedly reducing treatment trials of new drugs for the treatment of schizophrenia.
Dr. Torrey, along with Robert H. Yolken, MD, and H. Richard Lamb, MD, assessed the number of treatment trials for schizophrenia funded by the pharmaceutical industry and NIMH between 2005 and 2017, and found that, as the pharmaceutical industry reduced drug trials for schizophrenia by 59 percent, so too did NIMH, effectively stopping new drug trials.
By virtually halting new drug trials, the agency, which was created in 1946 to find better drugs for treating mental illnesses, has effectively abdicated its responsibilities to the roughly 2.8 million Americans suffering from the brutal disease. In the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry article, the authors explain that the current NIMH policy of "restricting targets to genetics or neural circuits is too narrow a vision" and that "NIMH should undertake a major treatment initiative directed at the subset of individuals with evidence of immune activation."
With estimated annual social and economic cost to the United States of $155.7 billion dollars, schizophrenia is one of the most important, costly, and least researched diseases of our time. In fact, there has been no significant pharmacologic advance for schizophrenia since clozapine was approved almost 30 years ago - a drug that can result in serious or unpleasant side effects, including weight gain, increased blood sugar and lipids, and movement disorders.
Last year, in a briefing paper provided to current NIMH Director, Dr. Joshua Gordon, the Treatment Advocacy Center outlined its concerns. In a published reply to the article, Dr. Gordon does not deny any of the allegations but says that NIMH is open to applications for additional drug trials along the lines suggested by Torrey et al.
The Treatment Advocacy Center's executive director John Snook pledged to keep an eye on NIMH's actions. "The reduction in schizophrenia drug trials by NIMH is completely unacceptable, given the importance of this disease. We will be monitoring their efforts very carefully to see if they improve," Snook said.
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The Treatment Advocacy Center is a national non-profit organization dedicated to eliminating barriers to the timely and effective treatment of severe mental illness by promoting laws, policies and practices for improved delivery of psychiatric care for severe and persistent psychiatric illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.