Martin Keller (psychiatrist)

Martin Keller is an American psychiatrist. He is Mary E. Zucker Professor and former chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island.

Career history

Keller earned his BA in psychology at Dartmouth College; his MD at Weill Cornell Medical College; internship at Bellevue Medical Center; and residency in psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

He has been a pioneer in prospective, longitudinal, naturalistic and neuropsychopharmacologic treatment research, including the development of new assessment methods such as The Longitudinal Follow-up Evaluation, which have become standard in the field and used in over 1,000 research programs worldwide.

The recipient of over 25 NIMH grants, his studies lead to a paradigm shift in understanding that mood and anxiety disorders are not short-lived episodes, but are primarily chronic, recurrent and disabling illnesses, expressed across the lifespan; which provided evidence to the Surgeon Generals report that depression is one of the more devastating public health problems.

Keller discovered that about 25% of major depressive episodes were superimposed on dysthymia, a condition labeled “double depression” which is more pernicious, chronic and disabling than most other forms of MDD. He first identified the serious undertreatment of MDD in 1982, and later organized a consensus conference concluding that less than 10% of patients with MDD receive adequate treatment. He applied these findings and methodologies to empirically develop new short term and maintenance treatment strategies for bipolar disorder, recurrent MDD and chronic MDD; with medication and psychotherapy alone, and in combination.

Efficacy of paroxetine

Further information: Study 329

Keller was the lead author of a controversial paper on the use of Paroxetine for treating mental illness in teenagers. The study on which this work was based, commonly known as study 329, found that paroxetine (marketing by its licence-holder GlaxoSmithKline as Seroxat) was no more effective than a placebo in alleviating symptoms such as self-harm and suicidal thoughts for patients in this age group. Subsequent studies using the same data concluded that the incidence of such symptoms was greater for those using Seroxat than for those given placebo.\

In addition, study 329 was ghostwritten with the help of ghostwriter Sally Laden. Internal emails housed in the Drug Industry Document Archive at the University of California, San Francisco show Dr. Keller saying, "You did a superb job with this. Thank you very much. It is excellent. Enclosed are some rather minor changes from me...”

Dear Dr Keller:
We are pleased to enclose all of the necessary materials for you to submit your manuscript, "Efficacy of Paroxetine but Not Imipramine in the Treatment of Adolescent Major Depression: A Randomized, Controlled Trial," to the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Please find enclosed the following items:
 • Five copies of the manuscript (submit four to the journal; keep one for your files)
 • One set of glossy prints of the figures (submit to the journal)
 • A draft cover letter to Dr Dulcan, editor of JAACAP (please retype on your own letterhead and revise as you like)