While psychiatry--similar to the Bush administration -- may want to blame its current unpopularity on the press, the corporate media is generally reluctant to challenge a powerful institution until it is already out of favor. Thus, the unpopularity of a powerful institution is usually well-earned through undeniable deceit, incompetence, corruption and failure.
Just how unpopular is psychiatry? A December 2006 Gallup poll on the "honesty and ethical standards" of different professions reported the following: 84 percent of Americans have a positive opinion of nurses, while only 38 percent have a positive opinion of psychiatrists--much lower than the 69 percent positive rating for other medical doctors.
Until recently, most journalists have been extremely timid about confronting Big Pharma's hijacking of psychiatry. One exception is Robert Whitaker, winner of the George Polk award for medical writing. Whitaker, in his book Mad in America (2002), summarizes the beginnings of the corruption of America's psychiatrists and their professional organization, the American Psychiatric Association (APA): "By the early 1970s, all of psychiatry was in the process of being transformed by the influence of drug money." Whitaker reported, "The APA, had become even more fiscally dependent on drug companies. Thirty percent of the APA's annual budget came from drug advertisements to its journals."
The APA, for quite some time, has seen no conflict of interest in its collaboration with drug companies. In 1992, after Upjohn, makers of the tranquilizer Halcion, had given an unrestricted gift of $1.5 million to the APA, the APA medical director claimed that the Upjohn-APA relationship was a "responsible, ethical partnership that uses the no-strings resources of one partner and the experts of the other." This sort of partnering has continued. In the first quarter of 2007, Eli Lilly, makers of the antidepressant Prozac and the antipsychotic Zyprexa, provided grants of over $412,000 for two APA programs: "Improving Depression Treatments" and "Understanding the Complexity of Bipolar Mixed Episodes."
Is the partnership between the APA and Big Pharma a "no-strings" relationship? The American Journal of Psychiatry is published by the APA. In September 2007, attempting to reverse declining antidepressant prescriptions in young people, an American Journal of Psychiatry study unjustifiably concluded that increased suicide was caused by decreased antidepressant use. This time The New York Times and others nailed APA's journal for its data dishonesty; and The Boston Globe reported that Pfizer, makers of the antidepressant Zoloft, had contributed $30,000 to that American Journal of Psychiatry study. This is only the tip of the iceberg.
When the serotonin-enhancer Prozac first hit the market in the late 1980s, Americans heard from the APA and psychiatry officialdom that depression is caused by a deficiency of serotonin. There was no proof of this, and by the mid-1990s the serotonin-deficiency theory of depression had been scientifically tested and rejected. But antidepressant manufactures knew that more people would take Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and other antidepressants if they believed these drugs worked by correcting a deficiency (analogous to insulin) rather than by "taking the edge off" (analogous to alcohol and illegal drugs). So drug companies and their partners in psychiatry kept quiet. Psychiatry also kept quiet about antidepressant tolerance (the need for an increasingly higher dosage), dependency, and nightmarish withdrawal--all of which was well-known in the scientific community several years before word got out to the general public.
In the past, those who have confronted Big Pharma's corruption of psychiatry have been accused by psychiatry apologists of belittling emotional suffering. But Americans increasingly understand that such smearing is as ridiculous as accusing critics of the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq of disloyalty to American soldiers.
Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007).
I enjoyed reading flawedplan’s (and other’s) positive comments but let me respond to the more negative comments.
Bobble’s view of that Prozac and other antidepressants (“4-6 weeks of taking a pill every day to achieve any effect at all”) may have been bobbe’s experience, but it NOT the case of millions of others.
In the New York Times Magazine on May 6, 2007, writer Bruce Stutz describes his nightmarish withdrawal from Effexor but also his first experience with Prozac, “He prescribed Prozac, but after only a few days on it, I began having nightmares.”
The effect of psychotropic drugs –legal and illegal – is very different for different people.
Just as antidepressant critics lose credibility when they fail to recognize that there are people like bobble who are positive about their antidepressant experience, antidepressant defenders lose credibility when they refuse to recognize just how many people have had nonproductive and counterproductive experiences with antidepressants.
Kellygrrrl makes an interesting point. The Gallup poll was a poll of “honesty and ethical standards,” and psychiatry’s ranking has been low in that area for quite some time, despite increasing media/Big Pharma attempts to provide psychiatry with respect. While some people continue to stigmatize emotional difficulties, I believe that psychiatry apologists insult the intelligence of the majority of Americans who have a low opinion of psychiatry by assuming that this low opinion is based solely on the “stigma issue.” With increasing numbers of American having received psychiatric treatment, that low opinion of psychiatry is often based on personal experience with psychiatry (for themselves, friends, family) and is also based on psychiatry’s problematic record--Bruce
Many people whose own family members are suffering from a psych disorders, eating disorders, bipolar, depression, etc., would not even think to get their loved one to a psychiatric professional. So I'm not sure that this is a downward trend.
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anyone who agrees with this author that prozac is "taking the edge off (analogous to alcohol and illegal drugs)" knows nothing about the actual effects and nothing about depression. first of all, you don't just pop a pill and feel great. it takes 4-6 weeks of taking a pill every day to achieve any effect at all. then, the effect is so subtle that at first you don't even notice it.
i still have ups and downs, just like normal folk. its just that i don't have a daily struggle to extract my outlook from a black hole. oh, don't normal people do that every day?
Got a problem? Take a pill.
Kids run amok, feed em Ritalin into their little bodies--but don't ever consider that your parental duties and your involvement in forming their approach to life is at all at fault nfor the incontrolable brats you so eagerly promote as some little misunderstood geniouses, are so inept that you have allowed your little darlings to run amok without any sense of their own responsibitlites to society. They are misunderstood!@! They have a "condition" that makes them so aborhent!!! G
Give them a pill!! send them off to school and then go to work at your job!! Situation controlled. They are after all, little geniuses that the teachers fail to recognize as such. Want to control your kids? Feed them Ritalin or other drugs and get on with your life.