Diseases Grow at Psychiatry Meeting--Thanks to Big Pharma

WARNING: Contains graphic images.

The first week in May brought a new leader in France and new prospects for US same sex couples seeking marriage. But at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in Philadelphia, attended by 11,000 psychiatrists, it was the same old same old. Instead of listening to the public outcry about overmedicated children, soldiers, elderly and everyday people watching too many drug ads, the psychiatry group re-affirmed its resolve to pathologize healthy people and even rolled out new groups to target.

This is the year the APA puts the finishing touches on DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a compendium that determines what treatments insurers will cover, what disorders merit funding as "public health" threats and of course, Pharma marketing and profits. Some question the objectivity of a disorder manual written by those who stand to benefit from an enlarged patient pool and new diseases. Furthering the appearance of self-dealing is the revelation that 57 percent of the DSM-5's authors have Pharma links.

For example, even though US Assistant Secretary of Defense Jonathan Woodson sent a memo to all branches of the military in February about overprescription of antipsychotic medications like Seroquel and Risperdal for PTSD, Pharma-consulting military physicians were given big billing at the APA meeting.

Seroquel, widely used in the military despite its link to sudden cardiac death, earned AstraZeneca nearly $6 billion in revenue last year, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. "IMS Health, a healthcare information and services company, said that in the 12 months ending in February of this year, 14.1 million Seroquel prescriptions were written, more than any other antipsychotic," it reports.

Most of the disorders that Pharma has helped monetize in recent years like depression, bipolar disorder, pediatric bipolar disorder and assorted "mood disorders" (once called "life") were on the meeting agenda. In fact, bipolar disorder was termed "under diagnosed" and said to be emerging as a new threat to the elderly. Watch out! But an alarming amount of attention also went to the apparent new Pharma profit center of alcoholism and drug addiction.

Addiction specialists have known for more than 70 years that the only "treatment" for drug addiction and alcoholism (after patients are detoxed) are anonymous, self-help programs that are also free. In fact medicine is as powerless to understand or treat drug addiction and alcoholism as alcoholics and drug addicts are over their addiction.

Still the US National Institutes of Health, in conjunction with Pharma, continues to spend millions, some say billions, developing "animal models" of addiction and vaccines to "cure" them. Nora D. Volkow, MD director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, says she seeks a vaccine to treat those at risk of alcoholism and drug addiction on the basis of "biological and environmental factors," before they get sick. (See: treating those "at risk" for psychosis or depression or bipolar disorder on the basis of their family histories with no symptoms or evidence.)

It is pretty fair to say Volkow is not an alcoholic or drug addict. Any of them could tell her they don't seek "help" until they're out of options--and even then not from a doctor but from each other. In fact, if Pharma, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the American Psychiatric Association think they can treat a disease caused by drugs with a drug, that's pretty insane. In fact, one of the treatments suggested for alcoholism at the meeting was quetiapine, also known as Seroquel.

Click for big version.
"Maternal and Fetal C-Cocaine Uptake and Kinetics Measured In Vivo by Combined PET and MRI in Pregnant Nonhuman Primates," Journal of Nuclear Medicine, February 1, 2005 vol. 46 no. 2 312-320

ENDS

© Scoop Media