Transcript 1972 Dr. Wayne O. Evans, psychiatrist

The Marketing of
Madness:
Are we all Insane?
“Psychomedication is now an accepted way of
life and the search for the just right pill has
become the goal for many people”
1972 Dr. Wayne O. Evans, psychiatrist
Irina Ryabikina
How can you medicate something that is not physically there?
- Psychotropic medication has no physical or
measurable physical abnormality to correct
- Naming more and more of life’s problems as
medical disorders requiring
Shyness – Social Anxiety Disorder
psychiatric treatment
Suspicion – Paranoid Personality Disorder
- 100 million people world wide
are on drugs
- Pharmaceutical companies are
making 150 000 dollars every minute
Having ups and downs – Bipolar Disorder
Homesickness – Separation
Weather Affectional Disorder
Compulsive Shopping Disorder
- 99.9% who come to a psychiatrist will be prescribed a medication
- Prescription drugs cause over 700 0000 00 serious adverse reactions
a year
- 42 000 deaths
- Third of a trillion dollars a year for the pharmaceutical industry
How did psychiatrists convince people that their emotional
problems were signs of mental illnesses?
- The drugs with no known curative powers and long list of side effects
- During 19th century psychiatrists functioned as almost exclusively
attendants and could not cure the seriously ill
- To increase their status they needed to become much more scientific
- Early psychotropic drugs – opium, morphine and heroin – didn’t cure
anything, but proved to bee highly addictive
- Physiologist Sigmund Freud played a major role in creating a
cocaine industry in the western world writing articles promoting
its use for spiritual distress and behavioral difficulties
“The psychic effect of cocainum muriaticum consists
of exhilaration and lasting euphoria, produced
no compulsive desire to use the stimulant further”
- Significant conflict of interest between Merk and
Park Davis rival pharmaceutical giants, both paying
him to endorse cocaine extracts
- His marketing campaign created a major cocaine
epidemic
- In 1954 the miracle drug to cure anything – Thorasine – was discovered
- Originally designed as a synthetic dye, then antiphrastic in pigs, was
accidentally discovered to immobilize patients exhibiting unwanted behavior
- A Major promotional campaign: paying influential psychiatrists as speakers,
organizing media campaigns and making TV shows
- Income soared by over 500%
- 250 million people worldwide on Thorazine – 23% more that the population of
the US
- Caused an irreversible movement disorder
- In 1954 – Miltown – first minor tranquilizer
- Marketing audience – psychiatrists print ads in professional publications,
prominent psychiatrists hired to spread the word to the rest of the medical fie
- Free samples were issued to get patients started on the drug
- By 1960, 36 million prescriptions had been filled, with 200 million dollars in
sales
- All drugs came with serious life changing side effects
- Miltown was labeled by the 1962 President’s Advisory Commission on narcot
and drug abuse as more dangerous and addictive that cocaine and
methamphetamine and fell quickly out of use
- Mental complaints no longer psychological, they were symptoms
of disease
- Prozac discovered – number of people diagnosed with
depression multiplied extensionally
- Miraculous recovery with almost no side effects of addiction,
instant psychological relief with little downside
- Mainstream psychiatry abandoned psychotherapy for
pharmacology forever
- The world was told that these new antidepressants are not just for
the depressed but lifestyle drugs, for a chose your mood society
Psychiatrist diagnostic manual
- In the 19th century Emil Kraeplin claimed that “it was almost impossible to
establish a fundamental distinction between the normal and the morbid mental
state”
- Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published in 1952 by the
American Psychiatric association with 112 so-called mental disorders,
-
1968 – 2nd edition with 145 disorders, not based on any science
- Dr. joseph Schildcrowd
Had no means of discovering what normal brain should chemistry consist of, he
theorized that mental problems MIGHT be cause by a biochemical imbalance of
neurotransmitters in the brain
Sounds scientific but there isn’t any way to measure it
Still claimed in the media and passed on to patients every day
- Without any tests confirming the chemical imbalance psychiatrists were bedeviled by a severe
inconsistency of diagnosis and were often unable to tell the sane from the insane
- 1972 The Rosenhan Experiment
- In 1980 – DSM 3 was introduced by Robert spritzer –
provided checklists of symptoms instead of causes, but these
descriptions were broad enough to be applied to any one at
any time of life
- DSM 1,2 – homosexuality, after 1973 was removed
- 1994, DSM 4 – 374 disorders, the number of
illnesses in the first edition tripled
- Psychiatric drugging rakes in over 18 billion dollars a year for
pharmaceutical companies
- Each new DSM helps embrace a wider audience
- Nearly 1 million children are diagnosed as bipolar, making it more common
than autism and diabetes combined
- In 2007 half a million children took at least one prescription antipsychotic,
20 000 under the age of six
- 22.8 billion dollar industry
- According to the World Health Organization, 450 million people worldwide have a
mental disorder, this is three times bigger than the population of Tokyo, New York, Los
Angeles, Paris, London, Mexico City, Mumbai, Milano, Madrid, Toronto, Washington,
Athens, Melborne, Hong Kong, Singapore, Rome and Berlin COMBINED
Condition branding
3 principle strategies of fostering the creation of psychiatric illness:
1) Elevating the importance of the condition
2) Redefine an existing condition
3) Create a new condition for an unmet market need
Prior to introduction of SSR antidepressants, depression was only diagnosed
in 100 people per million, has been raised to 100 000 people per million
10% of Americans, 27 000 million people currently on antidepressants
Expression of human emotion are now classified a major psychological
problem.
Side effects and safety
First, a drug would be hailed as a medical breakthrough for a mental problem, then
increasing reports of side effect would trigger in, and then, after years of denial, when the
companies could no longer deny the dangers of the drug, they would abandon it in favor of
the next magic drug
-
From physical symptoms to suicidal thoughts
- 34 Law suits a day for damage caused by psychotropic drugs
- 10-25% of users close to 7 million people experience akathisia which can lead
to suicide
- For every 100 000 people taking psychotropic drugs suisidal rate is 718