In my last post I considered the level of transparency provided by the British Association for Psychopharmacology (BAP) in relation to its recently published Guidelines on prescribing for depressive disorders.

This post, will very briefly look at the programme for the recent 2015 Summer Meeting and specifically the issue of transparency:

If you download the programme and then type “declaration” into text search you get zero responses.

The programme does list these sponsors:

I noticed that Stephen Stahl was giving several keynote educational talks on day one of this conference for the British Association for Psychopharmacology (BAP). Stephen Stahl is a world-wide “key opinion leader” who has his home in California.

In America all payments to individual doctors and academics must be provided for the public. This being a statutory requirement of a Sunshine Act. All payments can be established by typing into a searchable database called dollars for docs.

Here is the return, as at the time for writing, for Dr Stephen Stahl:

In the United Kingdom the public have no way of establishing if or how much individual British doctors or academics may have been paid by the pharmaceutical industry or by other commercial companies. When these individuals are involved in educating the healthcare profession or drawing up guidelines this situation needs to change. And soon.