A Fake Psychologist Treated Troubled Children, Prosecutors Say

Fake Credentials on LinkedIn Page

Michal Gold
The New York Times
Originally published September 29, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

But Mr. Payne has no formal counseling training that prosecutors were aware of. He told investigators that he was a doctor with a “home-schooled, unconventional education during the Black Panther era,” according to court papers.

None of Mr. Payne’s patients had been hospitalized or physically harmed, an official said. Some of his patients liked him and his treatment methods.

But others became suspicious during therapy sessions. Mr. Payne would often talk about his own life and not ask patients about theirs, the official said. He would also repeat exercises and worksheets in some of his sessions with little explanation, giving patients the sense that he had run out of ideas to treat them.

According to prosecutors, Mr. Payne and Ms. Tobierre-Desir worked at three locations: his main office in a large building in Brooklyn Heights, a smaller building in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens and the offices of a nonprofit based at Kings County Hospital Center, one of the hospitals with which Mr. Payne claimed to be affiliated.

Mr. Payne’s relationship with the nonprofit, the Kings Against Violence Initiative, was unclear. The group did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

The info is here.

The Case of Dr. Oz: Ethics, Evidence, and Does Professional Self-Regulation Work?

Jon Tilburt, Megan Allyse, and Frederic Hafferty
AMA Journal of Ethics
February 2017, Volume 19, Number 2: 199-206.

Abstract

Dr. Mehmet Oz is widely known not just as a successful media personality donning the title “America’s Doctor®,” but, we suggest, also as a physician visibly out of step with his profession. A recent, unsuccessful attempt to censure Dr. Oz raises the issue of whether the medical profession can effectively self-regulate at all. It also raises concern that the medical profession’s self-regulation might be selectively activated, perhaps only when the subject of professional censure has achieved a level of public visibility. We argue here that the medical profession must look at itself with a healthy dose of self-doubt about whether it has sufficient knowledge of or handle on the less visible Dr. “Ozes” quietly operating under the profession’s presumptive endorsement.

The information is here.

CU regent candidate raps "minutiae" amid false-degree claims

By Lynn Bartels
The Denver Post
Originally published June 8, 2012

A Republican running to sit on the governing board at the University of Colorado has erroneously told voters he has a master's degree in international economics from a prestigious East Coast university.

Matt Arnold

Called on it by critics, Matt Arnold mocked advanced degrees Thursday, explaining he completed the coursework but not his thesis.

"I was more interested in getting on with my life than trying to, quite frankly, waste more time in pursuit of academic BS that no one cares about," he said.

"I think that's one of the big problems, quite frankly, with education these days. We're graduating a bunch of people who hang letters after their names, but they have no useful skills."

The entire story is here.

Penn Dean Put on Leave in Probe over Degree

By Susan Snyder
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Originally published on April 26, 2012

The University of Pennsylvania placed the vice dean of its Graduate School of Education on administrative leave late Wednesday after The Inquirer began asking questions about his false claim to have a doctoral degree.

Doug E. Lynch has claimed on his resumé that he received the degree from Columbia University. A faculty website repeatedly refers to him as "Dr. Lynch."

Earlier Wednesday, Penn officials said they became aware of the misrepresentation a couple of months ago, taking unspecified "appropriate sanctions" but deciding to leave Lynch in his leadership role.

That changed after The Inquirer placed a call to Penn president Amy Gutmann for comment. The university then issued a one-sentence statement from Stephen J. MacCarthy, vice president for university communications.

"Doug Lynch has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of an ongoing investigation," MacCarthy's statement said.

The entire story is here.

Jonathan Alpert's Mis-Statements, And Possible Misconduct

By Todd Essig
Forbes: Leadership
Originally published April 23, 2012

An intentionally provocative opinion piece about psychotherapy was just published in the NY Times by Jonathan Alpert. Well, it worked. I’ve been provoked. Alpert is an apparently proud fellow who uses his web-site to trumpet being called “Manhattan’s most media-friendly psychotherapist.” In the article he lays claim to a style of psychotherapy that is a unique advance because unlike others he actually helps patients change. Other people, people like me, what we do is waste our patients lives so we can get paid. According to him relaxing “spa appointments” rather than anything useful are what people get from me and my kind.

How did this get past the Times editors? It is so clearly designed as an infomercial for selling the author’s go-for-the-gusto change-your-life in 28 days book. Plus the article is dangerous. It perpetuates the myth that psychotherapy is inefficient, ineffective snake oil, relaxing to be sure but snake oil nonetheless. In so doing it erects an unnecessary conceptual obstacle to getting help that someone might need.

The entire response to Mr. Alpert's article is here.

Thanks to Richard Ievoli for this article.  He could have been a contender.

J.&J. Fined $1.2 Billion in Drug Case

By Katie Thomas
The New York Times
Originally published April 11, 2012

A judge in Arkansas ordered Johnson & Johnson and a subsidiary to pay more than $1.2 billion in fines on Wednesday, a day after a jury found that the companies had minimized or concealed the dangers associated with an antipsychotic drug.

The fine, which experts said ranked among the largest on record for a state fraud case involving a drug company, is the most recent in a string of legal losses for Johnson & Johnson related to its marketing of the drug, Risperdal.

In January, Texas settled a similar case with the subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, for $158 million. Last year, a South Carolina judge levied civil penalties of $327 million against Janssen, and in 2010, a Louisiana jury awarded nearly $258 million in damages.

The entire story is here.

Here is a prior story about Johnson and Johnson with Risperdal.

How the FDA forgot the evidence: the case of donepezil 23 mg

By Lisa M Schwartz & Steven Woloshin
British Journal of Medicine
Published March 22, 2012

What is the difference between 20 and 23? If you said three, you are off by millions—of dollars in sales, that is—at least from the perspective of Eisai, the manufacturer of donepezil (marketed as Aricept by Pfizer).

A little context helps make the maths clearer. Donepezil, the biggest player in the lucrative market for Alzheimer’s disease treatments, was a blockbuster, with over $2bn in annual sales in the United States alone. But the drug, first approved in 1996, had reached the end of the road: the patent expired in November 2010. Investors call this “going over the cliff,” an anxious reference to plummeting sales as market share is lost to generic competitors. Necessity, however, is the mother of invention. Just four months before the expiry of the patent, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new dose for moderate to severe Alzheimer’s disease: donepezil 23 mg. Is 23 an odd number? Not really, when you consider that you cannot get to 23 mg using the 5 mg and 10 mg doses that were going generic. The “new” 23 mg product would be patent protected for three more years.

Now it was time for the marketing to begin. In addition to their sales force, the manufacturers deployed dedicated teams of “Aricept 23 mg clinical nurse educators” to reach prescribers. They focused particularly on “priority targets”—neurologists and high volume facilities for the long term care of people with Alzheimer’s disease—to promote the idea that “there are no ‘stable’ AD [Alzheimer’s disease] patients—therefore aggressive treatment is required.

The entire story is here.

Thanks to Ken Pope for the information.

Sandusky Case: Man who evaluated alleged victim was not yet psychologist

By Mike DawsonCentredaily.com
Originally published March 28, 2012

Dr. Morford

After State College psychologist Alycia Chambers talked to an 11-year-old boy about Jerry Sandusky showering with him in May 1998, she concluded Sandusky was exhibiting signs of grooming the boy for sexual abuse.

A couple days later, a counselor, John Seasock, met with the boy and had a different conclusion. The showering episode, Seasock determined, was rather the result of a routine that coaches like Sandusky do after a workout.

Centre County prosecutors did not pursue criminal charges against Sandusky after that incident, and whether the competing conclusions factored into that decision remains a subject of conjecture.

But, almost 14 years later, the fact that Seasock wasn’t a psychologist at the time, according to state records, raises questions about how much weight his opinion should have carried.

“To take that person’s word over a psychologist who has been prepared and licensed by the state is, I would say, very surprising and a serious concern,” said Marolyn Morford, a State College psychologist.

Morford said Tuesday she’s been alarmed by Seasock’s representation as a psychologist at the time in question. That’s how the Penn State police investigation report refers to him, and that’s how Seasock has been referred to in media reports after the document was leaked Saturday.

State records show that Seasock has been licensed as a professional counselor since January 2002.

The entire story is here.

Dr. Morford is a member of PPA's Ethics Committee.

Suspect in child-rape scheme was never a psychologist

By Jennifer Sullivan and Bob Young
Seattle Times staff reporters


David Scratchley is not all he claimed to be, though it wouldn't be apparent if you followed his career.

The head of a Seattle drug-treatment center, Scratchley authored books, gave speeches to city employees and co-hosted a radio show. He has worked in the Seattle area at least 23 years and is regarded as a local expert on substance abuse and addictions.

David Scratchley

Scratchley, 52, flatly claimed in a recent video to be a psychologist.

He is not.

He is training to be certified by the state as a chemical-dependency counselor, according to the Department of Health.

That's just one of the mysteries and exaggerations that surround Scratchley, who was arrested early Friday and has been held without bail at the King County Jail on investigation of attempted rape of a child in the first degree and communicating with a minor for immoral purposes.

According to Seattle police, Scratchley talked with a woman about raping a 10-year-old boy at his Belltown apartment on Thursday.

The woman, who said she met Scratchley through drug treatment, contacted police Thursday afternoon after being fearful that Scratchley planned to go ahead with the sexual assault.

Police found the child inside Scratchley's apartment building and took him to Harborview Medical Center; investigators did not say whether the child had been harmed. They also found suspected cocaine in the apartment, according to a Seattle police report.

King County prosecutors said that Wednesday is their deadline to file charges against Scratchley in Superior Court.

The state Department of Health opened an investigation of Scratchley on Tuesday because of media attention surrounding his arrest, though department officials said they have never received a complaint about him.

One thing the health department will focus on is Scratchley's claim he is a psychologist.

Scratchley, clinical manager of the treatment program at the Matt Talbot New Hope Recovery Center, has never been a licensed psychologist in the state of Washington, according to Department of Health officials and records.

There is no gray area when it comes to making such a claim, said Betty Moe, a department program manager. State law prohibits anyone from calling themselves a psychologist unless they've obtained such a credential from the Department of Health.

Read the entire story here.