Anchorage Daily News – July 9, 2011

By John Havelock

In Saturday’s column on public health and the pharmaceutical industry, the case was made that a public health policy driven by the profit motive leads to bad health policy and expanded federal budget deficits. Profit is a great driver of the free enterprise system but is a bad match with core public policies.

Reviews published in the two most recent issues of the New York Review of Books (NYRB), taking the psychiatric profession to task for the shameful influence of the pharmaceutical industry, demonstrate the potentially destructive impulse of the profit motive.

Psychiatry has almost dropped its original reliance on therapy in favor of pills, despite evidence that therapy or, surprisingly, exercise are usually just as effective for depression as the new prescription drugs. There is more money in prescribing pills. Diagnosis of mental illness has expanded dramatically so that, as the review author ironically reports, “It looks though it will be harder and harder to be normal.”

Particularly damaging is her report that diagnoses of children’s disorders have doubled multiple times in the last decade, so that half a million children now take antipsychotic drugs with potentially dangerous and sometimes lethal side effects.

As the author points out, the problem with “troubled children” is often troubled families in troubled circumstances. Careful exploration of their environment makes more sense as a starter. Many psychiatrists are also prescribing drugs “off-label” which allows them to speculate (with industry encouragement) in the prescription of drugs not approved by the FDA for the diagnoses being treated.