For the longest time, the field of psychiatry had remained silent about the STAR*D scandal. We put up this petition in September, calling for the American Journal of Psychiatry to retract its 2006 article that fraudulently told of a 67% cumulative remission rate, and while the American Journal of Psychiatry never responded to our petition, it did stir a response from the STAR*D investigators, who sought to defend their work with a claim -- that Ed Pigott and colleagues had created post-hoc criteria to remove good responders from their analysis--that was easily shown to be a lie.

That was the first crack in the wall of silence. Then, in its December issue, the Psychiatric Times ran a cover story about  Pigott's reanalysis of the STAR*D data, and it told of the possible extreme harm done by this fraud:

“For us in psychiatry, if the BMJ authors are correct, this is a huge setback, as all of the publications and policy decisions based on the STAR*D findings that became clinical dogma since 2006 will need to be reviewed, revisited, and possibly retracted.”

In response to the Psychiatric Times article: Mad in America has now published a new report on the scandal: Winding Back the Clock: What if the STAR*D Investigators Had Told the Truth.

So for all who signed this petition, thank you, I think it has had an impact, stirring these responses and making it impossible for the field of psychiatry to remain silent any longer.