$14.2 MILLION UNDISCLOSED FINANCIAL CONFLICTS IN DSM-5-TR, THE “BIBLE” OF PSYCHIATRY

“…Without question, unbiased, evidence-based mental health practices free from Big Pharma’s unethical influence are paramount to the health of our nation, especially now that the COVID-19 pandemic has pulled back the curtain on the anarchic corruption in American health care. In the United States and much of the world, the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the gold standard handbook for the diagnosis of mental disorders. To keep current, APA task force members recently revised the manual, which is now in its fifth edition and called DSM-5-TR (fifth text revision). In an effort to ensure the revisions were without industry influence, a recent investigation aimed to evaluate the financial ties the APA task force and panel members had with Big Pharma. And guess what? It turns out the “bible” of psychiatry, DSM-5-TR, included a whopping $14.2 million in undisclosed financial conflicts.

The special paper, titled “Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5-TR: cross-sectional analysis,” and published in the BMJ on January 10, 2024, explained that since 2013, under the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, all US drug and device manufacturers are required to disclose payments given to physicians and teaching hospitals. To facilitate this, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) developed the public access database called Open Payments, which identifies monies given by big pharma to individual physicians and institutions. As is undoubtedly the case with many drugs, including the deadly mRNA COVID-19 “vaccines,” the paper authors explained that Open Payments data can be used to determine the many ways financial conflicts of interest may influence physician behavior. The authors wrote:

“For example, this [Open Payments] database has been used to determine physicians’ likelihood to prescribe certain drugs and how that may have been influenced by compensation from the pharmaceutical industry.”…”