* * *Aparna Sen in Iti Mrinaliniin which she plays an actress suffering from depression*
*New Delhi, Aug. 11: *India’s first nationwide effort to estimate the prevalence of common mental disorders has been bogged down for five years by allegations of scientific misconduct, authorship disputes, and foreign collaborators cherrypicking Indian data. In the imbroglio, an Indian researcher squabbled with the Union health ministry over authorship and foreign scientists selectively used data that exaggerated the prevalence of mental disorders in India, doctors involved in the study or familiar with it have said. “This is embarrassing for India,” said Vikram Patel, a psychiatrist in Goa who also teaches at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and who was not associated with the study. “Five years after data collection, 90 per cent of the findings remain out of the public domain.” The health ministry had launched the study in 2002 to determine the prevalence of depression, anxiety, phobias and alcohol and drug abuse through community surveys in 11 urban and rural sites across India, ministry officials said. The study was part of a global mental health survey in 28 countries, supported by the World Health Organisation, and coordinated by Ronald Kessler, an epidemiologist at the Harvard Medical School in the US, they said. The study’s principal investigators (PIs) from government hospitals in Bangalore, Bhavnagar, Chandigarh, Dibrugarh, Imphal, Lucknow, Pondicherry, Pune, Ranchi and Tirupati submitted their data to psychiatrist Rajesh Sagar, the 11th PI, at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, by mid-2006. Sagar, as tasked, pooled the raw data and sent it to the global mental health consortium, a health official said. The ministry and the other PIs then waited for processed data to be returned, hoping to use it to generate a national report on mental health and research papers based on data from all 11 sites, said the official who asked not to be named. But they noticed that the consortium began publishing papers from the data, with Sagar as the sole Indian co-author. At least 10 papers have been published over the past two years, all using data from a single site: Pondicherry, the official said. Sagar also submitted three reports with the pooled data to the health ministry between June 2007 and September 2010, naming the other PIs as contributors or co-editors. One report omitted data from Bangalore, Chandigarh, and Ranchi. “We were shocked to see such publications appearing without our consent,” said Mathew Varghese, professor of psychiatry and a PI at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore. A health official said many of the PIs believed they should have been consulted during data analysis. “This was a collaborative study, and we wanted all to be part of analysis and share credit.” However, Sagar has argued that he had significantly contributed to the design of the study and interpretation of its results. In a letter to the ministry, he has said he is “the only one who fulfils criteria to lead the authorship”. In his complaint, Sagar said he has been “unjustifiably harassed” and has accused officials in the health ministry’s directorate general of health services of trying to appropriate research that he says was “initiated” by the AIIMS psychiatry department over a decade ago. “This seems to be a case of plagiarism and scientific misconduct,” he wrote in his letter that questions a decision by the DGHS to grant a health official co-authorship in a paper that the global mental health consortium published last month — again using only Pondicherry data. Three PIs told *The Telegraph* the decision to use only Pondicherry data has misrepresented the prevalence of common mental disorders in India. For instance, the prevalence of depression in Pondicherry is 9 per cent. At the other 10 sites, the prevalence levels were below 7 per cent, the PIs said. Sagar has said he was not responsible for selecting data for publications. He said the global mental health consortium had taken the decisions to eliminate data from three sites and to ignore the six other sites when papers on Pondicherry were under preparation. Kessler declined to respond to questions about the project, despite two requests by *The Telegraph*.But a psychiatrist in India said Kessler has told him that abnormally low levels of common mental disorders at the three sites had raised doubts about quality of data collection. Psychiatrists say the controversy moves the spotlight away from the real issue which is the absence of adequate mental health services in India. “It doesn’t really matter whether it’s 9 per cent or 3 per cent. India has tens of millions of people with mental disorders,” said Varghese. “We have only 6,000 mental health professionals and only 30,000 beds — only a small proportion of patients have access to mental health services.” http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110812/jsp/frontpage/story_14370354.js -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Mental Health Advocacy (News 'N Views) India" group. 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