How Drug Company Money Has Corrupted Psychiatry
- From: rpautrey2 <rpautrey2@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2008 07:38:37 -0700 (PDT)
How Drug Company Money Has Corrupted Psychiatry
by Loren R. Mosher, M.D.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the nationwide
organization to which most psychiatrists belong. In some ways it is a
trade union. A large proportion of its income is from drug company
advertising in its journals and newspaper. It also receives
"unrestricted educational grants" and convention revenue from drug
companies. Drug company sponsored symposia and exhibitions dominate
the two major annual psychiatric conventions. Of course, the symposia
speakers are paid handsomely for their half-day appearances. In my
opinion, the APA is so dependent on pharmaceutical company support
that it can not afford to criticize the overuse and misuse of
psychotropic drugs. Perhaps more importantly, the APA is unwilling to
mandate education of psychiatrists about the the seriousness of the
short and long-term toxicities and withdrawal reactions from the
drugs.
The drug companies pay speakers ($1000-2000 per appearance) who
give psychiatric grand rounds and/or evening speeches (dinner provided
by the company) to local psychiatric societies. Speakers come from
lists of psychiatrists who will basically endorse their products.
Doctors training to be psychiatrists are specially targeted for these
speakers.
The drug companies give contracts to university based and
private psychiatric research companies to conduct drug trials that are
required for U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the
drugs they sell. The company provides the protocol and the researcher
may receive as much as $40,000 per patient that completes the study.
This allows the drug company considerable influence on the way the
drug studies are conducted. All of these drug manufacturer activities
have increased in scope and intensity since the introduction of newly
patented drugs, beginning with Prozac in 1989. They must reap the
profits before patents run out.
Research protocols used in studies of psychiatric drugs required
for the approval of the FDA are supposed to be reviewed by
Institutional Review Boards (IRB's) to be sure they do not pose undue
risks to the study subjects. Members of these boards have been found
to be highly paid consultants to drug companies whose protocols they
review. That is, they have obvious conflicts of interests and are not
objective, unbiased reviewers of the psychiatric drug studies over
which they pass judgment. The latest "novel" anti-psychotic drug that
has been approved by our federal drug regulatory agency (FDA) is
Zeldox, which the FDA allowed to be introduced to the US market
despite Zeldox's dangers.
In my view American psychiatry has become drug dependent (that
is, devoted to pill pushing) at all levels - private practitioners,
public system psychiatrists, university faculty and organizationally.
What should be the most humanistic medical specialty has become
mechanistic, reductionistic, tunnel-visioned and dehumanizing. Modern
psychiatry has forgotten the Hippocratic principle: Above all, do no
harm.
THE AUTHOR, Loren R. Mosher, holds a B.A. from Stanford University and
an M.D., with honors, from Harvard Medical School, where he
subsequently received his psychiatric training. He is now Clinical
Professor of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of California,
San Diego, and Director of Soteria Associates, 2616 Angell Avenue, San
Diego, Calif. 92122, (858) 550-0312, Fax (858) 558-0854. See
www.mosher-soteria.com.
www.antipsychiatry.org
http://www.antipsychiatry.org/mosher.loren.1.htm
.
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