The British Association for Psychopharmacology [BAP] provides this policy on relations with industry and other organisations. BAP confirms that this policy was agreed by BAP Council in July 2019 and that “It will be reviewed annually”.
BAP provides a related document for this policy. It is the following Editorial [copyright with the British Association for Psychopharmacology]:
Personal comments on this Editorial by Peter J Gordon:
I fully support the plea that the Editorial makes that conflicts of interest should not be confined to declarations of links to pharmaceutical companies. As a campaigner for full transparency in science my position on this has never wavered. Evidence is not evidence if only a select part of it is shared. This applies not just to all trial data but to all material relating to scientific method, including factors that have the potential to introduce bias. The pharmaceutical industry spends more on marketing than it does on research, presumably because it is good for the business to do so.
It was welcome then that the following arguments were put so emphatically in this editorial:
[1] ‘Disclosure is strongly preferable to concealment’.
[2] ‘We have to insist that all conflicts of interest are declared when individuals make market-sensitive statements’.
[3] ‘In a better future, should we not simply place a higher premium on seeking the truth?’
Unfortunately, as far as I am aware, in the almost two decades that have passed since this Editorial was written, neither the British Association for Psychopharmacology nor the Journal of Psychopharmacology has offered any support for the introduction of legislation that would make it mandatory for all payments from industry to be declared on an open register. Furthermore, like the Royal College of Psychiatrists, there has been no official response to the Cumberlege Review on Patient Safety which had as one of its recommendations the requirement to introduce sunshine legislation. Without such legislation, the public can have no idea if UK paid opinion leaders may be receiving sums such as the visiting American Professor, Stephen Stahl;
The language used in this 2004 Editorial is interesting. It is making an argument in favour of wider transparency and yet uses language that comes across as defensive when referring to the most basic of influences i.e. direct payments from vested interests:
“The grotesque cultural relativism that makes my conflict of interest a vice and yours a virtue must wither and die”
“Unfortunately, in relation to the pharmaceutical industry, this bias is like a fever that has yet to run its course”
Returning to points highlighted in this Editorial:
[1] ‘Disclosure is strongly preferable to concealment’.
[2] ‘We have to insist that all conflicts of interest are declared when individuals make market-sensitive statements’.
[3] ‘In a better future, should we not simply place a higher premium on seeking the truth?’
Despite making these points, the author of this Editorial provided no declaration of potential competing interests. Given this I am not confident that the author would share my profound disappointment that, nearly 20 years on, his points have not been realised.