Dr. David Healy; visit his website
Dr. David Healy is a world-renowned psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist, neuropsycopharmacologist, scientist, and author. He undertook his doctoral research on the serotonin system on which antidepressants work, while qualifying in psychiatry. He moved to Cambridge University for higher training in psychiatry and to engage in post-doctoral research.
He has since been a Professor of Psychiatry in Cardiff University and Bangor University, working clinically in Britain’s National Health Service for 30 years before recently being appointed as a Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University in Canada. He is licensed to practice medicine in the U.K., Ireland, and Canada.
His clinical work has involved the full gamut of clinical activities, from inpatient care to outpatient and community care, covering all mental health conditions, including organic, psychotic, drug dependence, and personality-based conditions in all ages, from centenarians to adolescents. His main areas of research include the contribution of psychotropic drugs to suicide, for which he was one of the first researchers to make this link; adverse effects of drugs; conflict of interest between pharmaceutical companies and academic medicine; and the history of pharmacology. His combined clinical and pharmacology background led to his role as Secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology in the early 1990s and consultancies with most pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, Boots Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Lundbeck Organon, Pharmacia-Upjohn, Rhone-Poulenc Rorer, Pfizer, and SmithKline Beecham. Further, Dr. Healy has conducted clinical trials, given lectures, and chaired symposia for these companies, and knows how industry works better than the CMOs or those they have consulted in coming to their view.
He has published 25 books on medicine, primarily on physical treatments and the development of the pharmaceutical industry, including the standard histories of the antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood-stabilizers. He has authored over 60 chapters in books on similar issues, over 200 peer-reviewed articles, and over 250 other pieces, for the most part dealing with the impact of medicines on health care.
Dr. Healy has been invited to talk at over 400 international meetings on all continents – again, largely on medicines and the hazards of treatments at dozens of universities and professional associations around the world. He has been in involved numerous legal cases, centered primarily on the harms of treatment and acted as an expert in numerous cases in the United States involving suicide and psychotropic drugs. He has also publicly and internally provided testimony and consultation to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding psychotropic drugs and their effects.
Dr. Healy was the lead expert in Heather McCarthy’s son O’Shea’s wrongful death case against Regional Mental Health, John Kern M.D., Scott Siegall, MD and Paul Dobransky, MD. View his recorded testimony to the jury in Heather McCarthy's legal case.
Online:
- Visit Dr. David Healy’s website
- Visit Dr. David Healy’s Wikipedia page
On the “Know Risks” podcast:
- Know Risks Episode 2: “Your Hunch is the Science,” a conversation with Dr. David Healy (Part 1)
- Know Risks Episode 3: “Ghostwriting, Hiding the Data, and Marketing the Science,” a conversation with Dr. David Healy (Part 2)
- Know Risks Episode 4: “What is Akathisia ? Just Call It Delirium,” a conversation with Dr. David Healy (Part 3)
