A war has been waged for over two decades, both in the courts and in the pages of peer-reviewed medical journals, over a controversial study that recommended the antidepressant Paxil as “well tolerated” and an “effective” treatment for teens. The U.S. Department of Justice, in fact, charged Paxil’s manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline with criminal liability—winning a guilty plea and a $3 billion settlement in 2012 over the risks that Paxil posed by elevating “suicidal thinking and behavior” in young people.
But the psychiatric journal that published this research (which effectively cosigned GSK’s marketing strategy for teens) has now won its right in court to defer any retraction of its widely criticized study. A judge in Washington D.C. Superior Court has tossed a legal effort to compel the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry to not only take down the study but also, as the complaint puts it, “publish a corrective notice” on its own website and “in all databases where the article is hosted.”
The March 24, 2026 ruling does not weigh in on the study’s accuracy, however. Instead, the judge simply affirmed that journal articles are protected under First Amendment rights as free speech and thus couldn’t really be challenged in court as a “consumer product” in violation of the Consumer Protection and Procedures Act (even if that journal article is paywalled and costs $41.50 to download).
Still, the product liability attorney who brought the case to court, George W. Murgatroyd III, sees a silver lining in that his suit successfully pressured the journal’s owner, the AACAP, and its publisher, Elsevier, into amending the study last year with an “expression of concern” (EoC).
“The good news is we got the EoC,” as Murgatroyd put it to the nonprofit news site Retraction Watch. “The battle is not over yet, so we will see where it goes over the next several weeks.”
Allegations of suppressed evidence and corporate ‘ghostwriting’
Documents unearthed in a class action suit that followed DOJ’s $3 billion settlement revealed that the pharma giant had conscripted a communications agency, Scientific Therapeutics Information, to ghostwrite the first draft of what became this ostensibly independent journal article. STI’s ghostwriter and the study’s lead author, Dr. Martin Keller, somewhat comically contradicted one another on this issue in sworn depositions.
Medical researchers—including an expert witness for those plaintiffs’ attorneys—also managed to negotiate the release of the original randomized, controlled trial evidence cited in that journal article, now commonly known as “Study 329.” This release of a staggering 77,000 pages of anonymized case reports formed the basis for a sweeping reevaluation of the clinical results in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in 2015.
Those BMJ results were stark. Its authors found that paroxetine, the generic name for the brand name antidepressant Paxil, was “not statistically or clinically significantly different from [a] placebo” for patients between the ages of 12 and 18. Worse, the researchers determined that Paxil had produced a “clinically significant” increase in suicidal ideation and actions by the young people who took it as part of those trials.
An ‘expression of concern’
Murgatroyd expressed understandable outrage over the AACAP and Elsevier’s lack of action, dragging on correcting the record across the full decade since the BMJ published its critique.
“The mechanism of self-correction isn’t working,” he told Retraction Watch. “There is nothing good about that article. It’s evil. It promoted drugs to kids who killed themselves. There’s nothing worse than that. You can’t allow something like that to stand.”
The AACAP flagged Study 329 online on September 30, 2025, after Murgatroyd’s complaint was filed, noting that its journal wants to “alert readers to concerns that have been raised about the article.”
“Further review is underway,” the journal’s notice reads, “and an expression of concern will continue to be associated with the article until an outcome is reached.”
Murgatroyd said that he has also asked the journal for a complete copy of the results of this ongoing investigation once its review is completed. He opined that it would be “more than disappointing” if AACAP ultimately chose not to retract the study. “That would be outrageous,” he said.
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