Clinical trials and legal jeopardy.

On neither side of the Atlantic have research ethics committees found a satisfactory way of ensuring that all serious side-effects of new treatments being studied are noted and reported to them, without being deluged in reports of minor adverse events. The author of the following paper is probably the leading historian of psychopharmacology: he discusses the issue, and its implications for RECs, in the light of the serious side-effects of the new generation of SSR antidepressants.