The 2024 Summer Meeting of the British Association for Psychopharmacology [BAP] took place in Birmingham, 21 – 24 July. Material related to previous Summer Meetings can be found here.
The Mental Elf covered the BAP 2024 Summer Meeting:
The 2024 Summer Meeting celebrated Past Presidents. Many of the past Presidents of BAP are paid opinion leaders.
In the UK there is no way of accurately establishing how much money is paid by the pharmaceutical industry to paid opinion leaders.
The 2024 Gala Dinner: BAP past Presidents sit at the head table looking towards BAP’s ‘rising stars‘ [early career researchers and psychiatrists]:
Fine dining combined with entertainment:
The 2024 BAP Summer Meeting was opened by Professor Carmine Pariante [who has been described as psychiatry’s “poster boy” for the pharmaceutical industry]:
As a paid opinion leader, Professor Pariante has been successful in securing industry-friendly headlines in world-wide media. Without anything even close to ‘BBC fact checking’.
At this year’s BAP Summer Meeting Professor Pariante talked about collaboration:
Professor Catherine Harmer, the new President of BAP, is also a career-long paid opinion leader:
In her inaugural address she discussed mechanisms of Ketamine’s antidepressant action:
BAP Meetings are generally fully booked. This photograph from the 2024 Summer Meeting reveals a diverse group of attendees and a wide range of ages:
The Registrar of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Dr Trudi Seneviratne OBE, giving a talk at the BAP 2024 Summer Meeting:
There is an alliance between the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the British Association for Psychopharmacology (BAP) in relation to the provision of continuing medical education. Past RCPsych Minutes: “RCPsych Psychopharmacology Committee and the BAP usually jointly organised 6 or 7 sessions at the International Congress and it was important that this continues.”
There are a number of sponsored sessions at the Summer Meeting. This year, one of them is:
Dr Sameer Jauhar at the lectern, BAP 2024:
This session was shared with a full-time employee of Boehringer Ingelheim.
Dr Jauhar has received a number of awards from BAP.
Pictured here with Dr Catherine Harmer, BAP President, receiving his latest award:
Dr Jauhar chaired this BAP 2024 seminar:
The speaker at this seminar was Professor Philip J Cowen, Department of Psychiatry, Oxford University. Professor Cowen undertook paid work for the pharmaceutical industry up until 8 or 9 years ago.
More than a decade ago Professor Cowen responded to a BMJ article on antidepressants by questioning the author’s objectivity. In his response Professor Cowen light-heartedly questioned if Dr Des Spence was real: suggesting he might be no more than an editorial construct. Here Professor Cowen linked any ‘Big Pharma’ notion with fantastical conspiracy. Professor Cowen’s response, entitled ‘Constructionism,’ mentioned only one competing interest: “I am one of the authors of the “Shorter Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry” which treats bipolar II disorders as if it were a medical condition.” Printed in the same edition of that British Medical Journal was a featured editorial by Ray Moynihan: “With medical science so contaminated by conflicts of interest, what evidence can we trust?”
In May 2011 Professor Cowen wrote the lead Editorial in the British Journal of Psychiatry: ‘Has psychopharmacology got a future?’ in which he revealed more conflicts of interest than he chose to reveal in his reply to Dr Spence.
The Mental Elf:
Professor Guy Goodwin at the lectern BAP 2024:
In 2014, Professor Guy Goodwin, along with Professor David Nutt, featured on BBC Panorama. This investigative documentary explored their roles as paid opinion leaders and their promotion of newly, or soon to be patented, psychiatric drugs:
Professor Guy Goodwin is now Chief Medical Officer for COMPASS Pathways:
Professor Guy Goodwin: What a moment to join the party:
Professor David Nutt needs no introducing. Might he be the ‘Stephen Stahl’ of UK Psychiatry?:
2024: I submitted this to the BMJ: “The influence of paid opinion leaders on the prescribing of antidepressants in the UK”. The BMJ replied to say that they could not publish it as they did not have the resources to fact-check it:
In my response to the BMJ, I shared these published statements:
Professor David Nutt, 2022 : “Even the best-performing antidepressant drugs show modest efficacy, non-negligible side effects, discontinuation problems and high relapse rates, highlighting the need for new, improved treatments”
Professor David Nutt, 2014: “Antidepressants have an impressive effect size in the treatment of acute cases of depression” and “antidepressants have an impressive ability to prevent recurrence of depression … which makes them one of the most effective of all drugs”.
In relation to the “education” that Professor David Nutt provides, money does indeed talk.
A few highlights of Prof Nutt’s numerous contributions to mainstream media: “Psychedelic drugs could soon treat alcoholism”:
The race is on to get it to market:
BAP Summer Meeting 2024 closed with this ‘Guest Lecture‘:
The Mental Elf:
Unfortunately, Professor Krystal’s biography does not include details of his extensive paid work for industry. This material is however available through USA Open Payments:
With paid-opinion-leaders-ever-aplenty, BAP Summer Meeting 2024 came to a close. ‘Rising stars’ have been “educated”.
The Mental Elf : 
Hopefully by then, the conflation of marketing with education will be a distant past?