Healthy Skepticism Library item: 5931

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

Moncrieff J.
Psychiatric drug promotion and the politics of neo-liberalism.
Br J Psychiatry 2006 Apr 01; 188:301-2
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/188/4/301

Abstract:

The pharmaceutical industry has popularized the idea that many problems are caused by imbalances in brain chemicals. This message helps to further the aims of neo-liberal economic and social policies by breeding feelings of inadequacy and anxiety. These feelings in turn drive increasing consumption, encourage people to accept more pressured working conditions and inhibit social and political responses.

Keywords:
Advertising Antipsychotic Agents/therapeutic use* Brain Chemistry/physiology Drug Industry*/ethics Drug Industry*/legislation & jurisprudence Health Status Humans Mental Disorders/drug therapy* Mental Disorders/etiology Politics* Privatization Public Policy Socioeconomic Factors

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909