Dr. Carl Elliott

Well, thanks for having me.

I appreciate it.

Failure is basically how it led me into the book.

So...

I guess for me, the story begins back in 2008 when I first learned about the suicide of a young man named Dan Markinson in a research study in our Department of Psychiatry here at the University of Minnesota.

The circumstances of that were so gruesome and so horrific and so sort of blatantly exploitative and unethical.

that I felt as if it needed an external investigation, partly because of the circumstances of his death, but also to ensure that the same thing had not happened to others in our Department of Psychiatry.

And so I spent the better part of the next seven years basically trying to get that external investigation.

So Dan Markinson was a young man in his 20s who had become psychotic and delusional and dangerous as a result of a psychotic episode in the summer of 2003.

And his mother, after seeing him deteriorate over a period of months and seeing the kind of alarming things he had,

called the police, and he was eventually brought to Fairview Hospital, which is the teaching hospital here at the University of Minnesota.

And he was seen by the head of our schizophrenia program here, who thought he was psychotic, delusional, dangerous, admitted him to a locked ward, had him placed under a civil commitment order,

and fairly soon began to recruit him into an industry-funded study of antipsychotic drugs that he was doing.

His mother objected.

She didn't want him in a study.

She felt he could not consent to the study, that he was psychotic and incompetent, and that the circumstances, the civil commitment order, which essentially legally bound him to do whatever his psychiatrist was telling him to do,

prohibited him from being enrolled ethically, and she objected, but she was told, you know, sorry, he's an adult, he signed the consent form, he's in the study.

She then spent the next four months trying desperately to get him out of the study.

He had been discharged to a halfway house.

She could see him getting worse, becoming increasingly agitated, and she was afraid, violent,