I have been skeptical of the Psychiatric Industrial Complex since the late 1960s. The pathologizing of homosexuality was one thing but also the way they pathologized women who didn't conform to rigid sexist stereotypes.
Over the years I have watched as the Psychiatric Industrial Complex has turned childhood into reason to push medications on kids, medications that are basically speed.
A few years ago they tried to pathologize abused women and women in general due to first their menstrual and later in life due to menopause.
All this from a "science" with extremely dubious origins. One that seems more akin to a religion than a science.
From Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/zyprexa-antipsycotics-top-selling-drugs-in-us-2011-7
Robert Johnson
Jul. 20, 2011
Outselling even common drugs to treat high blood pressure and acid reflux, antipsychotic medications are the single top-selling prescription drug in the United States.
Once reserved for hard-core, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest type of mental illnesses to treat hallucinations, delusions or major thought disorders; today, the drugs are handed out to unruly kids and absent minded elderly.
A recent story in Al Jazeera by James Ridgeway of Mother Jones illuminates the efforts by major pharmaceutical companies to get doctors prescribing medicines like Zyprexa, Seroquel, and Abilify to patients for whom the drugs were never intended.
Focusing on psychiatrists because they rely on subjective diagnoses, the drug reps have been so successful that they've changed the criteria for mental illness and disability payments. Ridgeway quotes former New England Journal of Medicine editor Marcia Angell.
"[T]he tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 - from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling - a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children." Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are "simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one." Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, "Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people."
Particularly vulnerable because medication decisions are often out of their hands the old and the young suffer most.
Continue reading at: http://www.businessinsider.com/zyprexa-antipsycotics-top-selling-drugs-in-us-2011-7
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