The Pharmaceutical Industry: We're Medically Conditioned to Conform
Big Pharma uses advertising to transform
what may once have been considered character traits
into pathologies that one should treat with medication,
promoting the sense that individual idiosyncrasy
is a kind of disability that needs to be corrected
Big Bucks, Big Pharma Documentary More
We end up conforming to the same master personality,
the sort of synthetic pseudo-humans
we see impersonated on television,
people who are always happy,
never hostile or self-sabotaging,
never wracked by doubt,
never anything but eager to cooperate
and behave how society expects
Turning idiosyncrasies into mental health problems
is known as “condition branding
Big Pharma Conditions Us
Most of us naively regard mental disturbances, like physical ones, as timeless realities that our doctors address according to up-to-date research, employing medicines whose appropriateness and safety have been tested and approved by a benignly vigilant government.
In reality, however, there's a different world in which convictions, perceived needs, and choices regarding health care are manufactured along with the products that will match them.
The corporate giants popularly known as Big Pharma spend annually, worldwide, some $25 billion on marketing, and they employ more Washington lobbyists than there are legislators.
Their power, in relation to all of the forces that might oppose their will, is so disproportionately huge that they can dictate how they are to be (lightly) regulated, shape much of the medical research agenda, spin the findings in their favor, conceal incriminating data, co-opt their potential critics, and insidiously colonize both our doctors’ minds and our own.
We are losing individual autonomy in the face of marketing campaigns and the slipperiness of diagnosing mental illness on the basis of a movable feast of symptoms.
Big Pharma uses advertising to transform what may once have been considered character traits into pathologies that one should treat with medication, promoting the sense that individual idiosyncrasy is a kind of disability that needs to be corrected.
We end up conforming to the same master personality, the sort of synthetic pseudo-humans we see impersonated on television, people who are always happy, never hostile or self-sabotaging, never wracked by doubt, never anything but eager to cooperate and behave how society expects.
Turning idiosyncrasies into mental health problems is known as “condition branding.”
The industry treats the name of a disease as a brand and promulgates it with the same marketing techniques that a company would use for toothpaste or laundry detergent.
It's a process that has brought us social anxiety and restless legs syndrome and the depression epidemic.
The pharmaceutical industry connives in a subtle attack on individual autonomy, where people can be talked into feeling sick by advertising and other devious promotional campaigns.
The implication is that people don’t really know what to make of what they are feeling, and it’s our inclination to turn to social norms for guidance.
In our commercial, consumerist society, of course, those norms are bought and sold, and they hinge on solutions that permit for shopping and consuming objects with magic-seeming properties of transformation - like, say, Prozac.
Such drugs are political sedatives, since any relief they seem to provide also serves to dissuade us from wondering whether commercial imperatives dictated their prescription.
This is an old story, and it goes back to the imperatives that underlie the whole ediface of a consumer society, which hinges on an building an insecure populace that can be counted on to seek comfort in goods.
Advertising is the art of creating dissatisfaction, and preying on personal vulnerabilities is an especially efficient way of accomplishing that end.
The process is perhaps at its most extreme when the goods being advertised as medicines, and the dissatisfaction is elevated to the level of a disease that one ignores only at one’s personal peril.
The tendency of marketing to drift toward this maximalist approach is one reason sensible countries ban pharmaceutical advertising directed at consumers rather than theoretically disinterested medical professionals.
Big Pharma’s Disease Mongering [Original]
Most people blame Big Pharma and the docs in its pocket for elevating everyday anxiety to depression, depression to bipolar disease and childhood behavior problems to major psychiatric diseases.
But there are others to thank for the national pathology of creating and treating diseases that aren’t even there.
There’s the 200 US medical education and communication companies (MECCs) who ghostwrite journal articles for Big Pharma–”just sign here, Doc; we’ve reviewed the data”–for $20,000 to $40,000 per article.
Like Complete Healthcare Communications (CHC) whose phalanx of 40 medical writers, editors and librarians has submitted over 500 manuscripts to journals for clients Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis, Wyeth, Schering-Plough and AstraZeneca according to its promotional materials, with an acceptance rate of 80 percent.
And the MECC which wrote up the Merck-designed and paid for Vioxx trials less the death data which ran in Annals of Internal Medicine first author of the Advantage study Jeffrey Lisse recounts to the New York Times.
And of course there are the medical journals themselves which can make $450,000 off one article reprint as Big Pharma disseminates its messages under their masthead (”look, Doc–it says RIGHT HERE”) and untold ad page revenues.
In 2006 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) editor in chief Dr. Catherine DeAngelis had to apologize for Big Pharma tainted articles defending antidepressants during pregnancy and linking migraine with coronary risks in women.
The docs were getting money from antidepressant and heart medication manufacturers respectively. But ten months later she ran a pro Fosamax–a Merck drug–article about a study “designed jointly by the non-Merck investigators and Merck employees” and “supported by contracts with Merck and Co.”
Three Merck authors on the study disclosed they potentially owned Merck “stock and/or stock options” and the article’s 11 other authors disclosed 40 research grants, consultancies and other financial relationships with drug companies including Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Roche, SmithGlaxoKline, Wyeth, Novartis, Procter & Gamble and Merck.
Last summer the AMA was also criticized for earning $50 million a year selling the names, office addresses and practice types to data miners and detailers the better with which to sell doctors drugs.
Hey, doctors can opt out of the program says the AMA.
Of course advertising and public relations agencies have also helped the national thrall to Big Pharma by portraying a bad day as a Prozac deficiency, unruly children as Ritalin deficiencies, insomnia as an Ambien deficiency and old age as a hormone deficiency.
Slick PR firm, Cohn and Wolfe, is credited with vaulting “shyness” to a national psychiatric problem the answer for which is Paxil and creating faux grassroots patient groups like Freedom From Fear to push their clients’ drugs.
And Wyeth’s ad agency serenaded the nation with the message in its The Change You Deserve campaign that if we were not enjoying things the way we used to do, if we were lacking in what agencies used to call get-up-and-go, it was time to go on the antidepressant Effexor.
But Mr. and Ms. Plasma TV Screen are not off the hook either.
As long people ask themselves, “I wonder if I have Restless Legs Syndrome?” “Excessive Sleepiness?” “Intermittent Explosive Disorder?” they’ve taken the bait.
As long as people derive more of a thrill out of dosing and experimenting on themselves–in spite of the dangerous side effects and sometimes because of them–than having a life in which they define the problems and answers, Big Pharma has its living room lab animals.