{"id":22028,"date":"2012-10-08T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2012-10-08T11:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=22028"},"modified":"2012-10-08T00:57:54","modified_gmt":"2012-10-07T23:57:54","slug":"from-persuasion-to-coercion-psychopharmas-priesthood-of-the-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2012\/10\/from-persuasion-to-coercion-psychopharmas-priesthood-of-the-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"From Persuasion to Coercion: PsychoPharma\u2019s \u201cPriesthood of the Mind\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u201cpsychopharmaceutical complex\u201d[1]<\/strong>\u2014 modern psychiatry, the pharmaceutical industry, and an accommodative regulatory apparatus\u2013sustains itself through a public belief in its medical scientific expertise and legitimacy realized through marketing and public relations. Now a combination of more direct government involvement in medicine via the Affordable Care Act, the 2013 release of the American Psychiatric Association\u2019s (APA) new and expanded Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Volume V (DSM), alongside more comprehensive systems of federal health surveillance and biometric identification technologies suggest how psychiatry\u2019s behavioral norms and protocols will be more and more integrated into everyday life. Overall, the psychopharmaceutical complex appears poised to abandon a paradigm based on persuasion and belief and move toward a model encompassing coercion and decree to enforce its normalcy ideal.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cReason is man\u2019s faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man\u2019s ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man\u2019s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man\u2019s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.\u201d<\/em>\u2014Erich Fromm[2]<\/p>\n

Since the 1950s psychotropic drugs comprise the psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex\u2019s lucrative masterstroke of public relations and marketing. Heretofore the prevalence and use of such substances have been constructed in the public mind through a conditioned cultural obeisance toward professional expertise and its amplification in advertising and related promotional discourse. Twenty percent of Americans now take at least one drug to treat one or more psychiatric disorders. Usage among women and children under ten doubled between 2001 and 2010.[3] According to the Centers for Disease Control the \u201cselective serotonin reuptake inhibitors\u201d (SSRIs) class of antidepressants marketed under the now common brand names Zoloft, Celexa, Effexor, and Paxil, are among the most heavily prescribed drug types, with 11% of Americans over the age of 12 now on such treatment.<\/p>\n

Pharmaceuticals are widely prescribed by psychiatrists and general practitioners alike as treatment of conditions delineated in the DSM, through which the psychiatric profession exerts worldwide authority in defining what mental illness is in a sweeping array of behavioral designations applicable to thousands of subjectively interpreted behavioral abnormalities. The APA recommends antidepressant medication for a large proportion of alleged maladies, such as what it terms \u201cmoderate to severe depressive symptomatology.\u201d[4] Yet as historian David Healy notes, the current DSM IV has \u201cconveniently made it impossible to define dependence on SSRI\u2019s antipsychotics, or benzodiazepines as a disorder.\u201d[5]<\/p>\n

Between 1988-1994 and 2005-2008 antidepressant use in the US increased by close to 400%.[6] If usage were to expand further along this trajectory by the early 2020s two in five people will be taking antidepressants alone. Antidepressant sales peaked at $15 billion in 2003, yet expiration of drug patents, the pharmaceutical industry\u2019s inability to produce new \u201cblockbusters\u201d to take their place, and increasing reports that such drugs are useless and often dangerous may reduce sales to as little as $6 billion by 2016.[7]<\/p>\n

The four-fold expansion of antidepressant consumption demonstrates how \u201cdepression\u201d and the introduction of SSRIs have no doubt been a tremendous boon for pharmaceutical companies. Yet how depression and antidepressants have become such a taken-for-granted element of the public mind is a far less interrogated social phenomenon. Pharmaceutical companies wield tremendous power over discourse and belief through a carefully crafted advertising and public relations agenda that exceeds the often useless and dangerous products they sell.[8] Such effects have capitalized on the cultural inclination toward deference to expert opinion\u2014in this case toward psychiatry.<\/p>\n

Constructing the Profession and Its Object<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2006 investigative journalist Jon Rappoport conducted a series of interviews with Ellis Medavoy, an alias provided to a high-level public relations expert who played a major role in orchestrating and manipulating public perceptions of major health crises, including HIV\/AIDS. Among the PR man\u2019s revealing observations is how psychiatric expertise is largely the result of propaganda technique. \u201cProblem equals mental disorder equals diagnosis equals drugs,\u201d Medavoy explains.<\/p>\n

The PR job is to dress that up and give it scientific sounding context and you throw in all sorts of stuff about \u201cthe research\u201d\u2014and you have an industry. But in the larger frame, you have a priesthood of the mind. An official priesthood. Licensed. And you sell that, too, using other words. You REALLY sell that. \u201cNo one else knows anything about the mind. Only the psychiatrists have the knowledge.\u201d You sell \u201cneeds professional help\u201d and \u201cis going in for treatment\u201d and \u201cnew breakthroughs\u201d and all that crap. You sell it six ways from Sunday.[9]<\/p>\n

The intricacies of building a public creed around the twofold deity of pharmaceuticals and psychiatry involves several processes specific to advertising and public relations. For example, linguistic specialists fashion brand names to \u201ctap different synapses in their customers\u2019 brains: those linking the raw sounds of vowels and consonants known as phonemes to specific meanings and even emotions.\u201d[10] In this way the name for the archetypal SSRI Prozac was designed to have a specific resonance in consumers\u2019 minds. \u201cProzac: Pro is a rather pedestrian beginning, but the sounds p, z, and k all score high for the qualities active\/daring.\u201d The name of Prozac\u2019s close relation Zoloft involves the same method of linguistic engineering. \u201cZoloft: Zo means life in Greek and loft elevates the concept.\u201d Like Prozac, the SSRI Paxil includes the sounds z and k, along with \u201ccrackling, buzzing sounds [that] may subliminally suggest activity to back up the sequence ac, which suggests the word action.\u201d[11]<\/p>\n

Japan is the world\u2019s third largest market for pharmaceuticals and provides an illustrative example of the pharmaceutical industry\u2019s capacity to manipulate and seduce a society into the wide-scale use of specific psychoactive substances. Beginning in 1998 the country loosened its regulatory requirements for drug sales and advertising. By 2001 US-style direct-to-consumer drug advertising proliferated and US-based companies controlled close to 50% of Japan\u2019s $364.2 billion of pharmaceutical sales. The increased popularity and availability of branded drug products within a non-Western cultural milieu set the stage for marketing strategies involving the brisk construction of public perception to overcome cultural barriers and generate demand.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s when Japanese pharmaceutical corporation Meiji Seika was in the process of having a drug to treat \u201cobsessive-compulsive disorder\u201d approved by Japanese regulators, company officials realized that Japan had no standard diagnostic test for OSD. The company therefore proceeded to write its own definition, using US descriptors as a template. In the late 1990s Meiji Seika took this practice to an entirely new level when it obtained the go-ahead from regulators to market its own SSRI, Luvox.[12] After receiving approval the company faced an uphill battle of having the drug accepted in a country where, according to a survey conducted by the World Health Organization in the early 1990s, the most common prescription for a \u201cmood disorder\u201d was a mild tranquilizer.[13] In light of this, Meiji and several other interested corporate partners proceeded in \u201ceffecting nothing less than a sweeping cultural change,\u201d as one observer explained.<\/p>\n

One crucial step: altering the language people use to discuss depression. The Japanese word for clinical depression, utsu-byo<\/em>, had unpleasant associations with severe psychiatric illness. So Meiji and its partners began using the phrase kokoro no kaze<\/em>, which loosely translated means \u201cthe soul catching a cold.\u201d The message was clear: If you take pills to alleviate a stuffy nose in the wintertime, why not do the same for depression? The marketing director for Meiji and its affiliates says he would regularly make use of the kokoro no kaze line when explaining to Japanese reporters why the taboo surrounding the disease should be lifted.[14]<\/p>\n

America was far ahead of Japan in its recognition of pharmaceuticals to address mental illness. The notion that depression was a potential epidemic requiring \u201ctreatment\u201d was placed in the public mind several years before the immensely popular SSRI Prozac was introduced in 1988. The idea nevertheless requires continual reinforcement. So too does the questionable concept of \u201cscreenings\u201d to assess potentially injurious \u201cmoods\u201d or behaviors, a practice currently underway at some US healthcare facilities using DSM V classifications.<\/p>\n

The Architecture of Psychiatric and Police State Surveillance <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cScience does not possess the technology to measure biochemical imbalances in the living brain\u201d physician and author Peter R. Breggin observes. \u201cThe biochemical imbalances speculation is actually a drug company marketing campaign to sell drugs.\u201d[15] In this way, mental health \u201cscreenings\u201d lack the objective scientific gauging and assessment of physical indications to determine the existence of a disorder. Rather, the opinion is based on the subject\u2019s response to a series of questions.<\/p>\n

Over the past several years marketing methods have been implemented in earnest on American college campuses to condition a generation toward accepting the routine nature of mental health screenings. In the early 2000s Wyeth, maker of the antidepressant Effexor, sponsored \u201cmental-health educational campaigns\u201d on 10 college campuses. The 90-minute program, titled \u201cDepression in College, Real World, Real Life, Real Issues,\u201d took place in campus theaters and was hosted by MTV star and Effexor user Cara Kahn. The program\u2019s associated depression \u201cscreenings,\u201d now a commonplace feature of the public health regimen, were given upbeat sounding pitches, such as, \u201cStressed? Come find out how much,\u201d and \u201cCome test your mood.\u201d Industry representatives observed how such solicitations meet with higher interest among potential participants than would a more prosaic-sounding, \u201cdepression screening.\u201d[16]<\/p>\n

If the allure of psychotropic nostrums is wearing thin, as some industry and market trends suggest creating a need, by whatever means, for psychopharma\u2019s corresponding therapies and products is essential. The anticipated dearth in antidepressant sales alongside Western governments\u2019 broad acceptance of psychiatry\u2019s superficial articulation of aberrant human behavior and its remediation may go a long way in explaining recent widely publicized studies alleging a growing epidemic of mental illness and government programs decreeing obligatory mental health screenings of youth and attendant pharmaceutical treatment.<\/p>\n

What exactly constitutes a mental disorder requiring treatment? Again, the DSM V\u2019s forthcoming expanded assortment of peculiarities provides some indication of what future screenings may look for. An individual divulging her enjoyment of an occasional cigarette will be classified as suffering from \u201ctobacco use disorder.\u201d A social drinker may be designated with \u201calcohol use disorder.\u201d Someone regularly imbibing too many cups of coffee or iced teas may undergo \u201ccaffeine intoxication,\u201d or, worse, \u201ccaffeine-induced anxiety disorder.\u201d\u00a0 Spending too much time browsing the web, visiting online gambling sites, porn sites, or shopping too frequently may be respectively judged as \u201cinternet addiction,\u201d \u201cgambling disorder,\u201d \u201chypersexual disorder,\u201d and \u201ccompulsive shopping disorder,\u201d and accordingly prescribed treatment regimens.[17]<\/p>\n

Further, the expansion of psychiatry under federal auspices increases the potential for its Soviet-style abuse to silence political dissidents, as the recent case of former US Marine Brandon Raub illustrates.[18] Taking an insistent stance that weather modification exists or discussing World Trade Center Building 7\u2019s inexplicable September 11 collapse may be grounds for a diagnosis of \u201cparanoid delusional disorder.\u201d Activist overtures calling attention to the precarious rationales of the \u201cwar on terror,\u201d the Federal Reserve, or an overreaching police state could be easily classified as having unresolved \u201coppositional defiant disorder.\u201d<\/p>\n

With such a broad array of maladies which are themselves subject to the psychiatric practitioner\u2019s interpretation, nearly everyone is susceptible to the psychopharmaceutical combine\u2019s scrutiny, especially as it expands its purview to younger age groups. \u201cThe [ACA] is designed to help increase incentives to physicians and other health and mental health professionals to look after people across the entire continuum of care,\u201d psychologist John M. Grohol points out, editor of the popular website PsychCentral. \u201cResearch suggests that this sort of integrated, coordinated care is ultimately beneficial to the patient. It can help catch health issues before they become more serious concerns.\u201d[19]<\/p>\n

The growing mental illness epidemic\u2014or the psychiatric profession\u2019s contention of such\u2014has severe consequences not only in terms of personal anguish, but also for entire economic regions. Mental health experts assert that close to forty percent of Europeans are mentally ill, a problem estimated to cost the European economy alone several hundred billion euros annually. A 2011 study concludes 165 million EU residents are afflicted with some form of mental illness. \u201cThe immense treatment gap \u2026 for mental disorders has to be closed,\u201d the paper\u2019s lead author asserts. \u201cBecause mental disorders frequently start early in life, they have a strong malignant impact on later life \u2026 Only early targeted treatment in the young will effectively prevent the risk of increasingly largely proportions of severely ill \u2026 patients in the future.\u201d[20]<\/p>\n

In the US, where the ACA stresses \u201cthe importance of integrating and coordinating the delivery of physical and mental health services and provides incentives to providers to integrate care\u201d[21] an individual who may even have private insurance and visits the hospital for a physical sickness or injury will be increasingly subject to surveillance and evaluation in accordance with standards established by the DSM.<\/p>\n

The Centers for Disease Control\u2019s 2011 Mental Illness Surveillance Report stresses that 25% of Americans are mentally ill and one in two will develop a mental illness sometime in their lifetimes. Thus a program of \u201cpublic health surveillance\u201d comprised of \u201cpublic health officials, academicians, health-care providers, and advocacy groups\u201d will constitute \u201cmultiple surveillance systems\u201d to \u201creduc[e] the incidence, prevalence, severity, and economic impact of mental illnesses \u2026 assess associations between mental illness and other chronic medical conditions (e.g., obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and alcohol and substance abuse); identify populations at high risk for mental illness and target interventions, treatment, and prevention measures; and provide outcome measures for evaluating mental illness interventions.\u201d[22] The project uses the DSM to identify and diagnose such illnesses.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe public health importance of increasing treatment rates for depression is reflected in Healthy People 2020<\/em><\/a>,\u201d the CDC notes elsewhere, a ten year plan of the Department of Health and Human Services \u201cwhich includes national objectives to increase treatment for depression in adults and treatment for mental health problems in children.\u201d To aid the program the US government has established a Preventative Services Task Force that now recommends \u201cmental health screenings\u201d for children ages 12 thru 18. Like the Mental Illness Surveillance program, the Task Force uses the DSM as a template for its diagnoses.[23]<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

Given that the US federal government and insurance industry now have a combined investment in mitigating risk attached to the DSM\u2019s classificatory scheme over myriad personal behaviors, individuals and the broader society must collectively ask, \u201cWhere does such surveillance end?\u201d At present the individual may still exert some degree of control over what medical information s\/he wishes to disclose to the medical surveillance apparatus. However, the increasing deployment of biometric technology and the rapid move toward an electronic \u201ccashless\u201d base of financial transactions all but ensures the end of this modest sphere of privacy and the complete realization of a far-reaching panoptic grid by which to locate and identify private idiosyncracies and thereby produce candidates for \u201cinterventions\u201d and treatment.<\/p>\n

An imperative for calling out and resisting the psychopharmaceutical complex\u2019s ever-expanding grip on society is to understand and recognize its intertwined history with advertising and public relations of largely constructing public perceptions and what now constitutes a widely accepted set of beliefs toward mental wellness and disease. The fact that this enterprise will now be more closely allied with a national healthcare armature and a central component of the government-controlled medical stratagem suggests the coming fulfillment of a full-fledged pharmacological technocracy where through continued mass persuasion and government edict phony medicine and drugs will fill the vacuum of misspent and unfulfilled existence.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

1. This term was initially used by Peter R. Breggin in Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock, and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex<\/em>, Springer Publishing Company, 2007.<\/p>\n

2. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society<\/em>, New York: Rinehart and Company, 64.<\/p>\n

3. Shari Roan, \u201cOne in Five US Adults Takes Medication for\u00a0 Medical Disorder,\u201d Los Angeles Times<\/em>, November 16, 2011, http:\/\/articles.latimes.com\/2011\/nov\/16\/news\/la-heb-mental-health-20111116<\/a><\/p>\n

4. Centers for Disease Control\/National Center for Health Statistics, \u201cAntidepressant Use in Persons Aged 12 and Over,2005-2008,\u201d October 2011, http:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/nchs\/data\/databriefs\/db76.htm<\/a><\/p>\n

5. David Healy, The Creation of Psychopharmacology<\/em>, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 66-67, 330. DSM IV was published in 1994 and revised in 2000.<\/p>\n

6. CDC\/NCHS, \u201cAntidepressant Use.\u201d<\/p>\n

7. \u201cAntidepressants Give Drugmakers the Blues,\u201d Reuters, March 23, 2012, http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/2012\/03\/23\/us-depression-drugs-idUSBRE82M0MK20120323<\/a><\/p>\n

8. Ben Goldcare, \u201cThe Drugs Don\u2019t Work: A Modern Medical Scandal,\u201d UK Guardian<\/em>, September 21, 2012, http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/business\/2012\/sep\/21\/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre<\/a><\/p>\n

9. Jon Rappoport, \u201cAn Interview with Ellis Medavoy (alias) About Power,\u201d October 8, 2006. In Jon Rappoport, The Matrix Revealed<\/em> Vol. 1 (CD), 2012, http:\/\/nomorefakenews.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

10. Sharon Begley, \u201cWhat Goes Into A Brandname? A Letter at a Time,\u201d Wall Street Journal<\/em>, August 31, 2002, D1. This section is adapted from an argument developed in James F. Tracy, \u201cBetween Discourse and Being: The Commodification of Pharmaceuticals in Late Capitalism,\u201d The Communication Review<\/em> 7, 2004: 15-34.<\/p>\n

11. Begley, \u201cWhat Goes Into A Brandname?\u201d<\/p>\n

12. Peter Landers, \u201cWaiting for Prozac: Drugs Firms Push Japan to Change View of Depression,\u201d Wall Street Journal<\/em>, December 2, 2002, A1.<\/p>\n

13. Healy, The Creation of Psychopharmacology<\/em>, 66-67.<\/p>\n

14. Landers, \u201cWaiting for Prozac.\u201d<\/p>\n

15. Peter R. Breggin, The Antidepressant Fact Book: What Your Doctor Won\u2019t Tell You About Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and Luvox<\/em>, Cambridge MA: Perseus Publishing, 2001, 135.<\/p>\n

16. Paul Glader, \u201cFrom the Make of Effexor: Campus Forums on Depression,\u201d Wall Street Journal<\/em>, October 10, 2002, B1.<\/p>\n

17. See Christopher Lane, \u201cBitterness, Compulsive Shopping, and Internet Addiction,\u201d Slate.com, July 24, 2009, http:\/\/www.slate.com\/articles\/health_and_science\/medical_examiner\/2009\/07\/bitterness_compulsive_shopping_and_internet_addiction.html; Reuters\/Luke MacGregor<\/a>, \u201cDigital Age Overload: \u2018Internet Addiction\u2019 to be Classified as Mental Illness, Russia Today<\/em>, October 1, 2012, http:\/\/rt.com\/news\/internet-use-mental-illness-389\/<\/a><\/p>\n

18. Michael Kelley, \u201cMarine Veteran Brandon Raub Sentenced to Up to 30 Days in Psych Ward for Facebook Posts,\u201d Business Insider, August 20, 2012, http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/former-marine-brandon-raub-is-being-held-in-a-psychiatric-ward-over-facebook-posts-about-911-2012-8<\/a><\/p>\n

19. John M. Grohol, \u201cWhat the Affordable Care Act Means to Mental Health,\u201d PsychCentral, June 29, 2012, http:\/\/psychcentral.com\/blog\/archives\/2012\/06\/29\/what-the-affordable-care-act-means-to-mental-health\/<\/a><\/p>\n

20. Kate Kelland, \u201cNearly 40 Percent of Europeans Suffer Mental Illness,\u201d Reuters, September 4, 2011, http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/2011\/09\/04\/us-europe-mental-illness-idUSTRE7832JJ20110904<\/a><\/p>\n

21. Michael Friedman and Kimberly Williams, \u201cSupreme Court Decision Benefits People with Mental Illness,\u201d HuffPost Health Living, June 29, 2012, http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/michael-friedman-lmsw\/aca-mental-health_b_1636839.html<\/a><\/p>\n

22. William C. Reeves, MD, \u201cMental Illness Surveillance Among Adults in the United States,\u201d 2011, Centers for Disease Control Public Health Surveillance Program Office, http:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/mmwr\/preview\/mmwrhtml\/su6003a1.htm<\/a><\/p>\n

23. CDC\/NCHS, \u201cAntidepressant Use.\u201d<\/p>\n

____________________<\/p>\n

An Associate Professor of Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University, James Tracy\u2019s<\/strong> work on media history, politics and culture has appeared in a wide variety of academic journals, edited volumes, and alternative news and opinion outlets. Tracy is editor of Union for Democratic Communication\u2019s journal <\/em>Democratic Communiqu\u00e9<\/a> and a contributor to Project Censored\u2019s forthcoming publication <\/em>Censored 2013: The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2011-2012<\/a>. Additional writings and information are accessible at <\/em>memoryholeblog.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Since the 1950s psychotropic drugs comprise the psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex\u2019s lucrative masterstroke of public relations and marketing. Heretofore the prevalence and use of such substances have been constructed in the public mind through a conditioned cultural obeisance toward professional expertise and its amplification in advertising and related promotional discourse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22028","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=22028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22028\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}