Greenslit, 2012 Antidepressants and Advertising: Psychopharmaceuticals in Crisis

[Altostrata]

"Psychopharmaceuticals are currently in crisis," claims this study, and traces the history of deceptive marketing and sales-oriented research.

 

Yale J Biol Med. 2012 Mar;85(1):153-8. Epub 2012 Mar 29.

Antidepressants and advertising: psychopharmaceuticals in crisis.

Greenslit NP, Kaptchuk TJ.

 

Abstract at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22461754 Full text at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3313530/

 

As the efficacy and science of psychopharmaceuticals has become increasingly uncertain, marketing of these drugs to both physicians and consumers continues to a central part of a multi-billion dollar per year industry in the United States. We explore how such drug marketing portrays idealized scientific relationships between psychopharmaceuticals and depression; how multiple stakeholders, including scientists, regulatory agencies, and patient advocacy groups, negotiate neurobiological explanations of mental illness; and how the placebo effect has become a critical issue in these debates, including the possible role of drug advertising to influence the placebo effect directly. We argue that if and how antidepressants "work" is not a straightforward objective question, but rather a larger social contest involving scientific debate, the political history of the pharmaceutical industry, cultural discourses surrounding the role of drugs in society, and the interpretive flexibility of personal experience.

Introduction

Psychopharmaceuticals are currently in crisis, and the science of depression has become a contest between scientists, pharmaceutical marketing, physicians, professional medical organizations, regulatory agencies, and patients. Public controversies and medical uncertainties concerning antidepressants have become the norm [1,2,3]. Since direct-to-consumer (DTC†) advertising was approved by the FDA in 1997 [4], pharmaceutical companies have been accused of exaggerating claims of drug efficacy [5], downplaying the health risks of antidepressant use [6,7,8], and hiding behind smokescreen public relations slogans of medical “awareness campaigns,” while slyly growing drug markets by over-medicalizing everyday experiences such as sadness, anxiety, and shyness [9,10]. In this controversial arena, the science of antidepressants has become uncertain, and physicians, policymakers, and consumers are left with few brute facts about if and how antidepressants work. Yet physicians want effective medicines, patients and policymakers want clarity of information, and pharmaceutical companies need to appear to be providing both. To provide a better understanding of the current predicament around psychopharmaceuticals, this article will look at three issues: 1) How pharmaceutical advertisements and professional marketing literature portray an idealized and simplistic relationship between medications and psychiatric illness; 2) how other stakeholders (patients, scientists, physicians, regulatory agencies, professional societies) accept or challenge a simple neurobiology of mental illness; and 3) how the placebo effect has become an increasingly important issue in these debates, including the new role of drug advertising to influence the placebo effect directly.

 

Read free full text at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3313530/

[Barbarannamated]

Love how they separated scientists from physicians -

[Rhiannon]

Nice! Thanks for the link to the full text. Another one to print out for my doc.

[Rhiannon]

Love how they separated scientists from physicians -

 

I've been saying for a long time, the psychiatrists don't seem to be talking to the neuroscientists...