Drugmakers Continue to Profiteer on “Free” Mental Health Programs

Twelve Step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous are free, self-supporting and do not advertise so many do not know about them and their success rate.  (Disclosure: members of my own family have benefited from them.)  Such programs promote no drugs and use no psychiatric or psychology experts, relying instead on peer-to-peer healing.

But drugmakers and insurance companies are increasingly trying to monetize such groups.

They are succeeding. That is why so many people who once called themselves alcoholics and drug addicts now say they are “dually diagnosed” with “major depressive disorder” and “bipolar disorder.” (That’s what the psychiatrists and the rehab center said––both sponsored by drugmakers.) Today, when alcoholics and drug addicts leave rehab, they are lifelong Pharma customers when a cup of coffee and a hug used to be enough to keep someone clean and sober.

Of course, drugmakers get a lot of help in this mission from industry funded writers of the psychiatric “Bible” known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). These writers have elevated “depression,” once a transient and self-limiting condition, to “major depressive disorder.” For this lifelong, chronic and lucrative condition––resting on the now disproved chemical imbalance theory––they can remain on drugs like SSRIs for decades. Almost a quarter of US women over 60 are now on such pills according to the CDC!

The everyone’s-got-depression sales pitch and related over-prescribing of antidepressants has also ironically caused the current “bipolar” epidemic according to researchers writing in the BMJ and other scientific sources. “Our findings demonstrate a significant association between antidepressant therapy in patients with unipolar depression and an increased incidence of mania,” they wrote.

Why don’t more people resist the coopting of their mind, body and health into profit centers? Too many people believe the ad messages they hear and some like the identity, victimhood and excuses that can come from having a health condition. Go figure.

Poor Me! I am Mentally Ill

“The chemical imbalance that causes my illness is very difficult to regulate,” wrote one bipolar patient. “One minute, I’m full of energy, euphoric, oblivious to the world around me, impulsive and reckless. The next, I feel desolate, depressed, or apathetic.” Some of us would call that “life.”

Needless to say, drugmakers profit when people believe they have mental problems––just like they do when people are overweight and need diabetes, blood pressure and pain pills and knee and hip surgery

It has been so long since the medical profession assured people they were “probably fine” the public now believes that selling sickness and disease is normal and not a recent monster created by drugmakers and insurers.

But it is not harmless. The “I’m a victim” mentality harms the healthy patient, pollutes our drinking water with drugs and raises everyone’s healthcare costs. Worse, it removes a potential activist who feels incapacitated by “mental illness” from tackling injustice, inequality and corruption on the world stage. Too many would-be activists retreat into hypochondria and self-pity.

Drugmakers Are “Listening” 

Over the years, drugmakers have elevated anxiety and depression to “mental illness,” elevated its incidence to 1 in 5 US adults and concocted the term “behavioral health” for drug and alcohol treatment—to keep the psych drug gravy train rolling. Meanwhile, so-called “mental health” groups like the National Alliance on Mental Illness or NAMI, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and Active Minds have hidden their drugmaker funding behind “foundations” and their attempts to appear “grass roots.”

Beware. Some of them sponsor the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing “I’m Listening” Audacity program.

This week, the drug industry news site StatNews lamented that not enough recovering opioid addicts are taking drugs like methadone and buprenorphine. It even ridiculed the Twelve Step admonishment that recovering people should not seek an “easier, softer way” to sobriety or being clean from the use of drugs. Worse, the StatNews pro-drug message is in a series called “War on Recovery.”

Opioid makers not only willfully created addicts, some who are selling buprenorphine are actually profiting on their deeds too according to a Vox article about the opioid poster company Purdue.

There are few free treatments in the medical world and even less that rely on peer-to-peer healing. Apparently drugmakers can fix that. That is the real War on Recovery.

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