How has Big Pharma managed to get so many children on expensive drug cocktails for “mental illness”? Drugs that they may not even need? Big Pharma has spent millions on public relations campaigns that tell parents, teachers and clinicians to dose children at the first sign of problems
The vast majority of research presented at conferences was funded by pharmaceutical companies. Of the industry-supported studies, 97.4 percent reported results that were positive toward the medicine that the study was designed to test, and 2.6 percent reported mixed results. No industry-sponsored studies with negative results were found!
In his book Psychiatryland, psychiatrist Phillip Sinaikin recounts reading a scientific article in which it was debated whether a three-year-old girl who ran out into traffic had oppositional-defiant disorder or bipolar disorder, the latter marked by “grandiose delusions” that she was special and cars could not harm her.1
How did the once modest medical specialty of child psychiatry become the aggressive “pediatric psychopharmacology” that finds ADHD, pediatric conduct disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, mixed manias, social phobia, anxiety, sleep disorders, borderline disorders, assorted “spectrum” disorders, irritability, aggression, pervasive development disorders, personality disorders, and even schizophrenia under every rock? And how did this branch of psychiatry come to find the answer to the “psychopathologies” in the name of the discipline itself: pediatric psychopharmacology? Just good marketing. Pharma is wooing the pediatric patient because that’s where the money is. Just like country and western songs about finding love where you can when there is no love to be found at home. Pharma has stopped finding “love” in the form of the new blockbuster drugs that catapulted it through the 1990s and 2000s. According to the Wall Street Journal, new drugs made Pharma only $4.3 billion in 2010 compared with $11.8 billion in 2005—a two-thirds drop
It happens every day to people of all ages, but there are certain people who in death shine a spotlight on paradigms of cultural fragmentation and social inconsistency, even though most of us don’t see it at first.
Even while America and the rest of the world celebrate these icons’ lives, these “stars” illume a sad state of the American condition, and in some ways perhaps focus a beam on the collective human suffering. These public figures ante up the unnecessary ultimate price for a peoples that more and more feel alone in a crowd and are turning to Big Pharma to sate our appetites for some kind of reprieve from our psychic suffering. We are looking for that missing mirror of wholeness, and many believe it’s in a bottle.
On the outset, let me say I am not against all prescription drugs. Just most psychotropic medicines. I am passionately against the mass epidemic promotion and consumption of drugs in a world that cannot seem to produce unbiased numbers that substantiate efficacy in the realm of pill popping bliss.
It’s no secret that advertising works. Big Pharma wouldn’t spend over $4 billion a year on direct-to-consumer advertising if it didn’t mean massive profits.
What is more unknown is why drug ads that sow hypochondria, raise health fears and “sell” diseases are often the most common–and effective–even when the drugs themselves are of questionable safety.
The nation’s fourth most frequent drug ads in 2009 for were Cymbalta, making Eli Lilly $3.1 billion in one year, despite the antidepressant’s links to liver problems and suicide. Pfizer spent $157 million advertising Lyrica for fibromyalgia in 2009, despite the seizure pill’s links to life-threatening allergic reactions. The same year, it spent $107 million advertising the antidepressant Pristiq, even though it also had links to liver problems.