{"id":104233,"date":"2018-01-01T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2018-01-01T12:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=104233"},"modified":"2018-01-01T12:15:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-01T12:15:00","slug":"how-pharma-uses-the-charge-of-stigma-to-sell-psychiatric-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/01\/how-pharma-uses-the-charge-of-stigma-to-sell-psychiatric-drugs\/","title":{"rendered":"How Pharma Uses the Charge of \u2018Stigma\u2019 to Sell Psychiatric Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"

28 Dec 2017 – <\/em>Do you overeat? Did your boyfriend just break up with you? Does no one return your emails? Do you fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning? If so, you may be suffering from mental illness!<\/em> Mental illness is a highly stigmatized, life-long condition, says Pharma, that millions do not even realize they have and only a pharmaceutical drug can fix. Luckily there are advocacy groups like Glenn Close\u2019s Bring Change to Mind and the Pharma-funded front groups, the American Foundation<\/a> for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) and the National Alliance<\/a> on Mental Illness (NAMI) to help you.<\/p>\n

The elevation of everyday symptoms to \u201cmental illness\u201d and accusation that sufferers are victims who experience \u201cstigma\u201d is the best thing that ever happened to Pharma. The charges have enabled it to aggregate and co-opt patients into lobbying groups that appear \u201cgrassroots\u201d for its high-priced psychiatric drugs. While these groups say they fight the \u201cstigma\u201d of mental illness, they actually spend their time fighting lawmakers and insurers, at the behest of Pharma, for payment of high-priced drugs. \u201cWhen insurers balk at reimbursing patients for new prescription medications,\u201d says the Los Angeles<\/a> Times, these groups \u201ctypically swing into action, rallying sufferers to appear before public and consumer panels [and] contact lawmakers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The patient front groups include<\/a> the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, which gets half its funding from Pharma, according to the Los Angeles Times, and NAMI, which received $23 million in just two years from Pharma, according to the Wall Street Journal. In the 1990s, Eli Lilly was NAMI\u2019s biggest donor, reported Mother Jones. A woman I interviewed who wants to remain anonymous for medical privacy says she was told by the Chicago NAMI they could not help her with a borderline condition because there was no \u201cdrug\u201d for it. So much for helping patients.<\/p>\n

In 2014, NAMI was successful in defeating a White House proposal to limit Medicare coverage of Wellbutrin, Paxil, Prozac, Abilify, Seroquel and other expensive drug classes. \u201cThe proposal undermines a key protection for some of the sickest, most vulnerable Medicare beneficiaries,\u201d said Andrew Sperling, a tear-jerking NAMI lobbyist using the image of elderly victims to give Pharma billions of our taxpayer dollars.<\/p>\n

Another group yelling \u201cstigma\u201d to sell psychiatric drugs is Active Minds, which says <\/a>it is \u201cthe leading nonprofit organization that empowers students to speak openly about mental health in order to educate others and encourage help-seeking . . . Through campus-wide events and national programs, Active Minds aims to remove the stigma that surrounds mental health issues, and create a comfortable environment for an open conversation about mental health issues on campuses nationwide.\u201d<\/p>\n

Active Minds calls itself a student group but when I went<\/a> to the room in the student building at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where the organization was supposed to be headquartered, they were not there\u2014nor had a desk clerk in the student union and no one ever heard of them. Unlike student groups against climate change or for LGBT rights, Active Minds\u2019 fancy T-shirts and cagey PR apparatus hardly look \u201cgrassroots.\u201d In fact, the group gets financial support<\/a> from Eli Lilly, one of the top makers of psychiatric drugs.<\/p>\n

After the apparent suicides of two Northwestern University<\/a> students in 2012, Active Minds and NAMI descended upon the campus decrying stigma and \u201cbarriers\u201d to treatments\u2013\u2013postulating that the students needed psychiatric drugs and did not get them. But press stories never reported whether the students who killed themselves needed<\/em> the drugs (allegedly) or were on <\/em>the drugs and suffering from their well documented suicidal side effects<\/a>, especially in young people. Suicidal side effects also emerge when patients discontinue psychiatric drugs. The deaths looked like shameless sales opportunities by Active Minds and NAMI.<\/p>\n

A more recent group yelling \u201cstigma\u201d and terming eating disorders and everyday anxiety \u201cmental illness\u201d is Glenn Close\u2019s Bring Change to Mind. It has plastered Chicago subways with posters which it calls its \u201cPSA\u201d campaign. If its high budget, slick commercials selling the idea that everyone, everywhere is \u201cmentally ill\u201d and a candidate for Pharma drugs are public service announcements, why deny Exxon and Monsanto PSAs?<\/p>\n

Despite the efforts of NAMI, AFSP, Active Minds and Glenn Close\u2019s group, all of which have brought the use of antidepressants to an all time high, the suicide rate in the United States is rising not falling. Suicide has risen to<\/a> 38,000 a year, says USA Today, after falling in the 1990s\u2013\u2013despite almost a quarter of the population in some age groups taking antidepressants. Use of some psychiatric drugs has grown by 700 percent<\/a> in the military. Shouldn\u2019t suicides be going down with so many people on psychiatric drugs?<\/p>\n

The truth is the expensive, Wall Street-pleasing drugs which many people stay on for decades, or life, are often ineffectual and sometimes cause the very problems they are supposed to alleviate like suicide.<\/a> Despite high budget campaigns to convince people they are mentally ill and need psychiatric drugs, the real \u201cstigma\u201d is increasingly on people who won\u2019t<\/em> accept the Pharma diagnoses or drugs.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

Martha Rosenberg is a freelance journalist and the author of the highly acclaimed, <\/em>Born with a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp the Public Health, published by Prometheus Books.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 intrepidreport.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

28 Dec 2017 – Do you overeat? Did your boyfriend just break up with you? Does no one return your emails? Do you fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning? If so, you may be suffering from mental illness! Mental illness is a highly stigmatized, life-long condition, says Pharma, that millions do not even realize they have and only a pharmaceutical drug can fix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":90169,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-capitalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}