Seroquel II: Borderline Personality Disorder

Spoiler alert: it does not work.

The Frontier Psychiatrists? It’s your source for grump columns reviewing data, among other things. It’s written by Owen Scott Muir, M.D., DFAACAP. It’s also a live-action series of conferences called “Rapid Acting Mental Health Treatment”—the next is in NYC on May 5th. You should get your ticket now!

Today, we continue our thrilling journey into the story of Seroquel (Quetiapine) reviewing one of my favorite papers to teach trainees of all time. Not, I will warn readers, because it’s a “great paper.” It’s research so bad it landed in The NY Times as a cautionary tale about clinical trial nonsense by big Pharma in which some of the drugs ended up in morning oatmeal for sex offenders. This is not a joke. Is there any more NYT headline than the following?

However, I will argue the Times reporting gets this almost completely wrong:

Last fall, an article in The American Journal of Psychiatry caught the attention of specialists who treat borderline personality disorder, an intractable …