By Christopher Shea

James C. Coyne, a psychologist at Penn, began a recent post on his Psychology Today blog, about a new study involving depression and cancer patients, in this provocative fashion:

Pfizer gave a psychologist at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida over $10 million to study whether oncology professionals’ attention to cancer patientsʼ psychological distress could effectively be monitored through chart review. Why this extraordinary amount of money? Is it a matter of generous, unrestricted philanthropy, or is there a clever marketing strategy behind it?

He also slapped a snappy headline (“$10 Million from Pfizer: Generous Philanthropy or Buying Influence?”) and subtitle (“Is Pharma Hijacking Screening Cancer Patients for Distress?”) atop the post. Basically, the concern he voiced in the item was that the structure of the study would encourage doctors to satisfy the screening-for-distress standard with a few curt questions and a quick prescription for anti-depressants.

In an account of what happened next, he writes,

Shortly after posting the blog, I was notified that PT staff took it down. Mysteriously, my profile photo was also removed. An email from PT announced that the blog had been removed for editorial review and I was told in a telephone call to PT ..  that concerns had been raised that the blog’s provocative title and subtitle offend the pharmaceutical companies that regularly advertise in the side panels accompanying blogs.

The post then returned, under a new, strenuously non-provocative headline, “Cancer Treatment and the Pursuit of Quality Indicators,” with its Facebook “Likes” set to zero. Coyne says he’s been told all of his future posts will be subject to pre-approval.

Coyne is not, incidentally, a committed opponent of anti-depressants; he’s also used his blog pulpit to argue against people who say they are worthless, he explains.

The tagline of his blog, the Skeptical Sleuth, is “Applying a healthy dose of skepticism to new findings about health and psychology.”

In his comments about the editorial conflict, he also offers some wry comments about the vagaries of blogging about psychology:

I got over 10,000 hits with an early post “Did a Study Really Show that Abstinence Before Marriage Makes for Better Sex Afterwards?” but only 681 shortly thereafter for “How Much Do Behavioral Interventions Change Cardiovascular Risk Factors?” Hopefully I can resist being shaped by the contrast.

Join the club, professor.