University of Minnesota must investigate suicide in psychiatric research study

The University of Minnesota must set up independent inquiry to examine what happened in clinical trial that led to the 2004 death of Dan Markingson, say scholars Over one hundred seventy leading scholars in health law, bioethics and medical research have called on the University of Minnesota to investigate the 2004 death of a psychiatric research subject, charging that university administrators have ”refused to publicly engage in a transparent, open, and critical assessment of what went wrong in this study.”   The letter, led by Trudo Lemmens, the Scholl Chair of Health Law and Policy at the University of Toronto, and five colleagues from leading U.S. institutions, urges the Faculty Senate of the University of Minnesota to request an immediate, public inquiry into the troubled study. Dan Markingson was acutely psychotic when University of Minnesota psychiatrists enrolled him into an AstraZeneca-sponsored study of antipsychotic drugs. He had been repeatedly judged incompetent to make his own medical decisions and was also under an involuntary commitment order that legally required him to obey the recommendations of the psychiatrists. His mother, Mary Weiss, attempted to get her son out of the study for months, warning that he was in danger of killing himself, but her warnings were ignored.  On May 8, 2004, Markingson committed a violent suicide. A 2009 investigation of Markingson’s death by the St. Paul Pioneer Press found that the university psychiatrists h...
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