Healthy Skepticism Library item: 10793
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: news
Allan C.
Do the drug companies takes us all for mugs?
The Guardian 2007 Jul 4
http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialcare/comment/0,,2117464,00.html
Full text:
It all began with a mug. I was sitting in reception at my local community care centre (CCC), waiting to see my social worker. On the wall behind me, a rack of leaflets on parking permits and sexual health; to my left, on the council phone, a woman screaming at housing repairs; opposite, a poster warning that abuse would not be tolerated; and round to my right, the reception desk, behind a screen of steel strands. It is not a prepossessing place. The walls appear to be made of cardboard, there’s graffiti outside on the sign, and yet, despite all this, the CCC still manages to feel both warm and welcoming.
In large part, this is due to Sherry, the supremely able receptionist, who greets all-comers, whatever their condition – and I, for one, have arrived in a range of conditions – with friendly competence. One hand on the computer, one passing a pen through the screen, while hunting for the keys to the meeting room, transferring a stream of impatient calls, and chatting to a homeless client who’s come in to pass the time. Seldom do work and worker find such a fit.
I was leafing through a copy of a newspaper someone had left on the table, when I noticed the man. Unkempt, unshaven, overweight, trembling slightly from medication, he cradled his mug of tea. I recognised him vaguely from the wards – a talented pianist, as I remember.
We nodded at each other, but it wasn’t the man who caught my attention so much as the mug he was holding. Emblazoned across it in large blue letters was the name of a familiar brand of antipsychotic medication.
For many psychiatric patients, the subject of medication is an emotive one. While most acknowledge it can be helpful, few embrace it eagerly. Quite apart from a reluctance to accept one’s need to be permanently drugged, the side-effects can be highly unpleasant – from weight gain to dizziness, blurred vision and shakes, exhaustion, and loss of libido.
In addition, they can be dangerous. When the antipsychotic drug Thioridazine was withdrawn in 2005, we suddenly learned that the meds we’d been taking – in some cases daily for years – could cause fatal heart rhythms.
Personally, I take medication because experience has shown that I work better with than without it. I have learned to put up with the side-effects, but that doesn’t mean I want to drink tea from a mug with a Risperdal logo.
I am not opposed to medication per se, nor the pharmaceutical companies that produce it, but until that mug shocked me into doing a bit of research, I had no idea of the influence such companies exert over almost every aspect of my treatment. Christmas comes but once a year – unless you happen to work on the medical side of psychiatric care.
Mugs, it would seem, are the least of it. Mobile phone chargers, memory sticks, desk tidies, diaries, books and pens, not to mention the lavish dinners and overseas trips to attractive locations for company presentations. You might ask: “So what? What harm can it do? What’s a handful of pens between shrinks?” But if all of this has no impact, then why do they do it?
And it doesn’t stop there. The National Institute for Mental Health in England (NIMHE) last week hosted a conference on choice in psychiatric services. The invitation from Louis Appleby, the National Director for Mental Health, states that the conference, which is “free of charge”, is a joint venture involving three partners – among them a leading pharmaceutical company.
So what do the patients’ groups have to say? Remarkably little, it appears. And then I discover that many of these also receive funding from pharmaceutical companies.
Does it matter? I think it does. For one thing, it distorts the picture in favour of purely biological explanations for psychiatric conditions. For another, the more “conditions” you discover, the greater the market for drugs becomes, and this leads to an increasing tendency to pathologise problems previously considered a normal part of being human. Once shyness becomes “social phobia”, you can start taking Paxil for it.
Sitting there watching Sherry at work, it’s hard to believe that, in a boardroom somewhere, men in suits are getting rich on us all. Depressing – but somehow I don’t think Prozac is going to touch it.
· Clare Allan is a writer and novelist
