The Marketing of Madness:

Are we all Insane?

Irina Ryabikina

“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

- Psychotropic medication has no physical or measurable physical abnormality to correct

- Naming more and more of life’s problems as medical disorders requiring

psychiatric treatment

- 100 million people world wide are on drugs

- Pharmaceutical companies are making 150 000 dollars every minute

How can you medicate something that is not physically there?

Shyness – Social Anxiety DisorderSuspicion – Paranoid Personality DisorderHaving ups and downs – Bipolar DisorderHomesickness – SeparationWeather Affectional DisorderCompulsive 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

- 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

How did psychiatrists convince people that their emotional problems were signs of mental illnesses?

- 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 field

- 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 narcotic 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 SchildcrowdHad 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 brainSounds scientific but there isn’t any way to measure itStill 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 condition2) Redefine an existing condition3) 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.

- 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

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