Big Pharma & the Manufacturing of Madness: generating 17% annual profit returns over 25 years!

 The U.S. pharmaceutical industry is one of the most profitable industries in the history of the world, averaging a return of 17 percent on revenue over the last quarter century.

Wow - that's a huge profit margin from Big Pharma drugs taking over society 

 Antidepressant medications rank third in pharmaceutical sales worldwide, with $13.4 billion in sales last year alone. This represents 4.2 percent of all pharmaceutical sales globally. Antipsychotic medications generated $6.5 billion in revenue.

How Big Pharma controls "doctors"

 Here are several suggestions for remedies in our relationship with the industry.

•

We need to embrace a new professional ethic. The doctor-patient relationship should not be a market-driven phenomenon.

•

Preceptorships should be considered unethical.

•

Enticements, gifts, parties, and so on should be reined in because patients must believe that their doctor has their best interests in mind when a prescription is handed to them.

•

We must re-evaluate single-sponsored medical education events and phase them out in favor of more general support for CME along with a careful policing of these events for bias.

•

The amount and support received by individual clinicians and researchers from industry should be transparent and the information readily available.

•

When we attend lectures at annual meetings and other educational events, and read journals and textbooks, we should know very clearly about the industry support given to presenters and authors.

https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/informit.939326328216738 

 Mental illness was once an esoteric affliction. Now we're told that it's a nearly universal experience. Witness the proliferation of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, group therapy, counselling, behaviour therapy, rehab and pills. It seems that the few of us who aren't in treatment are at least candidates for it. Transnational drug companies, known by the sobriquet, 'Big Pharma', offer drugs for almost every mental health problem and for an increasing number of non-problems. This article is a critical analysis of the mental illness industry with particular emphasis on the use of drugs that claim to be psychotherapeutic.

Big Pharma and the Manufacture of Madness

Authors:

Dale M Atrens

 ‘Quadrant’ is Australia’s leading journal of ideas, essays, literature, poetry, and historical and political debate.

 Dale M. Atrens, a psychobiologist at the University of Sydney, Australia,