Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4289

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Dumont MP.
In bed together at the market: psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry.
Am J Orthopsychiatry 1990 Oct; 60:(4):484-5

Abstract:

Some years ago, Nathan S. Klein, one of the luminaries of psychopharmacology, wrote that “The contacts of psychiatry with the pharmaceutical industry have been so overwhelmingly beneficial that it would be well-nigh criminal to jeopardize them.” As if one could! The best that this “well-nigh criminal” can do is suggest that the profession give up its coquettish claims to psychotherapy and social science and openly declare its identity as an arm of the drug industry. It need fear no indignant response from a federal government that defines private profit as its raison d‘être. Indeed, the May-June 1990 issue of the Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health Administration’s newsletter featured a front-page announcement of its own “partnership to speed up and intensify the development of medications for addictive and mental disorders.” So, with federal agencies kowtowing to drug companies, the psychiatric profession is free to jettison what’s left of its ethical burdens and join the world’s fin-de-siècle scramble to the marketplace. For all intents and purposes, this has already taken place.

Keywords:
*analysis/United States/psychiatrists & psychiatry/ relationship between medical profession and industry/attitude toward industry/ drug company sponsored research/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: HEALTH PROFESSIONALS/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: LINKS BETWEEN HEALTH PROFESSIONALS AND INDUSTRY/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE/PROMOTIONAL TECHNIQUES: DETAILING/SPONSORSHIP: RESEARCH