[Reader-list] death, depression and prozac
Vivek Narayanan
vivek at sarai.net
Wed Apr 6 11:32:57 IST 2005
This could be a nice thing to think through, and argue about: depression
and its treatment? Cockburn is his usual provocative self-- I had no
idea that the suicide rate for psychiatrists is twice the US national
rate! (From Counterpunch.org)
V
Death, Depression and Prozac
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
/New Dehli, India./
Jeff Weise, teen slayer of ten, including himself, at the Red Lake
Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, was on Prozac, prescribed by
some doc. How did the consultation go? "Here Jeff, take these, they may
help you get over life's little problems, like the fact that when you
were 8 your dad committed suicide and when you were 10 your cousin was
killed in a car wreck that left your mom with partial paralysis and an
injured brain. And let's face it, Jeff, most likely you'll never get off
the res. You're here for the rest of your life." Cut to a shot of the
doc holding up a Prozac bottle, like the kindly fellow in the white coat
and mirrored headband in 1950s Lucky Strike ads, telling us that Luckies
were a fine way to soothe a raspy throat.
The minute the high command at Eli Lilly, manufacturer of Prozac, saw
those news stories about Weise you can bet they went into crisis mode,
and only began to relax when Weise's websurfs of neo-Nazi sites took
over the headlines. Hitler trumps Prozac every time, particularly if
it's an Injun teen ranting about racial purity. How many times, amid the
carnage of such homicidal sprees, do investigators find a prescription
for antidepressants at the murder scene? Luvox at Columbine, Prozac at
Louisville, Kentucky, where Joseph Wesbecker killed nine, including
himself. You'll find many such stories in the past fifteen years.
By now the Lilly defense formula is pretty standardized:self-righteous
handouts about the company's costly research and rigorous screening,
crowned by the imprimatur of that watchdog for the public interest, the
FDA. And of course there's the bogus comfort of numbers; if Lilly's pill
factory had a big sign like MacDonald's, it could boast Prozac: Billions
Served.
Each burst in the sewage pipe brings a new challenge to Lilly's sales
force, which has had some heavy hitters down the years, including George
Herbert Walker Bush (onetime member of the Lilly board of directors);
former Enron CEO Ken Lay (onetime member of the board); George W. Bush's
former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mitch Daniels (a
former senior vice president); George W. Bush's Homeland Security
Advisory Council member Sidney Taurel (a Lilly CEO); or the National
Alliance for the Mentally Ill (a recipient of Lilly funding).
At the turn of this year there was a five-alarm incident when the
British Medical Journal went back to the 1994 Wesbecker suit against
Lilly, reminding the world that the company had been involved in some
shifty footwork involving a back-door payoff to the plaintiffs in a deal
that successfully excluded from Judge John Potter's courtroom the
regulatory case history of Oraflex, a highly compromised Lilly product,
which displayed the company's supposed disclosures to the FDA in an
unpleasing light.
Lilly rose to the challenge, successfully persuading gullible
journalists that the real story concerned a lonely freelancer writing
for BMJ and not a powerful pharmaceutical company with a huge
advertising budget. The press dutifully shifted its focus from Lilly's
outrageous efforts to suppress evidence to the narrow question of
whether a piece of evidence had really been in the public record in the
years since 1997, when Judge Potter changed his verdict to "dismissed as
settled with prejudice," very far from the victory Lilly had been claiming.
That's the trouble with time, as Paul Krassner joked about Waldheimer's
Disease, which is when you get old and forget you were a Nazi. But it's
never too late to review the origins of the Depression Industry in the
late 1980s, and the saga of what happened after three Lilly researchers
concocted a potion in the mid-1970s they christened fluoxetine
hydrochloride, later known to the world as Prozac.
Long years of rigorous testing? When Fred Gardner and I investigated the
selling of depression and Prozac in the mid-1990s, we found that
clinical trials excluded suicidal patients, children and the
elderlyoalthough once FDA approval was granted, the drug could be
prescribed for anyone. According to Dr. Peter Breggin, the well-known
psychiatrist who analyzed the FDA's approval of Prozac, it was based,
ultimately, on three studies indicating that fluoxetine relieved some
symptoms of depression more effectively than a placebo, and in the face
of nine studies indicating no positive effect. Only sixty- three
patients were on fluoxetine (fluoexetine hydrochloride was branded as
Prozac in the mid 70s) for a period of more than two years. By 1988 the
National Institute of Mental Health had not only put the government
stamp of approval on corporate-funded depression research but had
created a mechanism whereby government money and personnel could be
employed to stimulate demand for corporate products.
Psychiatrists--a breed whose adepts, so stated a study published in the
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 1980, commit suicide at twice the
national rate--have been central to the entire enterprise. The process
linking their sorcery to the corporate bottom line has a robust
simplicity to it. As Prozac came off Lilly's research bench and headed
for the mass production line psychiatrists labored to formulate a
multitude of bogus pathologies to be installed in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, whose chief editor in the 1980s
was Robert Spitzer MD, an orgone box veteran and adept copywriter
skilled at minting new ailments for late twentieth-century America and
sanctioning treatment, medication, state funding for the requisite pills
(no expensive consultative therapy) and reimbursement by insurance
companies.
When detailed research showed likely linkage of Prozac to violent acts.
Lilly-liveried psychiatrists were there to douse the flames of doubt. In
1991 the FDA's Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee met to
decide whether Prozac should carry a warning label about links to
suicide. Five out of the ten panel members (eight of whom were shrinks)
had active financial interests in the drugs the committee was
investigating, and all voted against requiring a warning, their obvious
conflicts duly sanitized by the toothless FDA. Other shrinks in the hire
of the drug companies urged ever wider application of Prozac to remedy
social angst, inclcluding plans for compulsory Prozac-dosing of youngsters.
In 2000, when hundreds of farmers in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh
were committing suicide because of neoliberal policies that had
destroyed their livelihoods, the state government announced it was
sending out a team of shrinks to determine why the farmers were
depressed. The implication was that these people were mentally unstable.
But in India credulity about the causes of depression is not so far
advanced. The plan provoked a storm of ridicule, and in the elections
that followed the Andhra Pradesh government, darling of Western
neoliberals, was duly trounced.
No such happy chance in the United States, where government is in the
pay of drug companies and prescriptions for antidepressants have long
since taken over from political manifestos that would cure depression by
collective social action. How they must have cheered at Eli Lilly when
the Senate wiped out Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy statutes, fostering
family violence, heightened crime and a vast new potential market for
Prozac and kindred potions at the stroke of a pen.
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