Summary of the canon of psychopharmacology

So what does the canon of psychopharmacology teach us? An important lesson is that even though the studies were conducted outside the realm of the pharmaceutical industry, by academic centers and with government funding, in each case the researchers seemed strongly biased toward the most positive favorable spin they could give to the drugs being studied. This result stands out especially because the studies found, each in its own way, that the drugs being studied were less effective than had been presumed before these studies were conducted. Many of the more complex questions the studies were designed to answer, such as relative efficacy between agents, could not even be addressed because of the overall low effectiveness of the medications for these illnesses.

Methodologically, the main way in which researchers gave their most positive spin to these studies was by Bayesian interpretations where the weak results of these specific studies were downplayed in the context of partial and positively-biased interpretations of the scientific literature. Besides that aspect, researchers also interpreted secondary results in a positive and partial manner, such as ignoring relapse after acute recovery in commonly-cited STAR*D figures or ignoring false negative results due to misuse of p-values in CATIE and STEP-BD tolerability outcomes.