If your child/teenager, had significant mental health issues, and you felt that medication was something that might need to be used, you would expect it to have been tested to rigorous standards.
After all, that is why drugs come with such a high price tag, the double blind RCT’s to ensure effiacy and safety.
But back in 2001, you would have been wrong when your GP/Psychiatrist suggested using paroxetine (“Paxil”).
It began with a lie, a big, fat, juicy, and, as it turns out, a dangerous one.
In 2001, the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP) published a paper claiming the antidepressant paroxetine was “effective and well tolerated” for depressed teenagers.
But it wasn’t true.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK – the makers of paroxetine) already knew their own trials showed no benefit over placebo and an increased risk of suicidal behaviour.
Instead of reporting the results honestly, the company hired a PR firm to ghostwrite a paper, used academics who never saw the raw data, and marketed the misleading article as proof that Paxil worked.
This became known as Study 329, one of the most notorious cases of scientific fraud in psychiatry.
For years, the article stayed in print, despite regulators world wide, noting an increased risk of suicide.
Regulators issued warnings, but the journal refused to retract it. Thus Doctors kept citing it, prescribing it and young people were harmed, many died.
Now, more than 20 years later, a lawyer is suing JAACAP and its publisher, arguing they knowingly sold and promoted a false scientific article that still misleads the public.
How GSK turned failure into success
GSK’s adolescent trial showed Paxil didn’t help. Internally, executives called the results “commercially unacceptable” and that disclosure of the poor efficacy data would “undermine the profile of paroxetine.”
So they rewrote the story: favourable outcomes were cherry-picked, negative data buried, and secondary measures inflated to claim success. The paper listed 22 authors; most never accessed the actual data.
Once the article appeared in print, GSK’s sales force distributed it to thousands of doctors as “proof” that Paxil worked in teens.
GSK used the published article to drive sales, earning over a billion dollars from the adolescent market in just three years.
Regulators eventually confirmed the truth: Paxil didn’t work for young people and increased suicidal thoughts.
In 2003, the FDA concluded: “There is currently no evidence that Paxil is effective in children and adolescents with major depressive disorder.”
In 2012, GSK paid a $3 billion settlement, one of the largest healthcare fraud fines in US history, and Study 329 was cited as key evidence.
Yet JAACAP still refused to retract the paper.
In 2025, attorney George W. Murgatroyd III filed a complaint accusing the journal and publisher of continuing to distribute a deceptive article. He argues they protected influential authors and their own reputation instead of correcting the record. He is asking the court to force a retraction and issue a public correction.
Shortly after the lawsuit, JAACAP finally issued an Expression of Concern, the first acknowledgment that something was wrong.
A 2015 independent re-analysis had already shown the truth:
Paxil offered no benefit, and suicidal events were heavily downplayed or renamed as “emotional lability.” Even the study protocol was changed after the fact to make the drug look better.
The move follows years of external pressure, including a 2015 BMJ reanalysis by Le Noury et al. known as Restoring Study 329.
Why a retraction matters
If the court orders a retraction, it could set a precedent that journals can be held accountable for knowingly publishing and profiting from fraudulent research. It may also expose how closely medical journals, professional societies, and drug companies are intertwined.
For me this is the most scary part. The journal simply let it stay published to allow GSK to continue promting the drug despite safety issues.
Beyond Paxil
Study 329 was not a one-off. The same patterns: ghostwriting, selective reporting, hidden harms, appear in other antidepressant trials, including the fluoxetine studies JAACAP published to support Prozac’s approval for children.
For now, the hope is that Study 329 will finally be retracted — a long-overdue correction for families who lost children and for a generation misled by corrupted science.
“Everything about it was bad, and the fact that it ended up killing kids just made it beyond the pale,” said Murgatroyd. “You cannot trust the drug company to accurately report on its findings.”
With this level of overt deception and lies to make money, whilst killing children, you can only wonder what else has or is going on we do not know about.