A mental health blog I’ve recently started reading, Furious Seasons written by P. Dawdy, has been blogging about Seroquel, a medication that has normally been used for acute mania in bipolar disorder. Now, Seroquel is being pushed for depression in bipolar disorder. In one of his older posts, he wrote: “So my hunch is that there must be money for researchers in going after BP, and Pharma companies must be willing to foot the bill. Yes, I am cynical.”
This has been my thinking for sometime now and I’m glad that someone had the gumption to say so. I’m highly cynical of pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies don’t care about whether medications help people as long as they don’t kill anybody, which detracts from their profits in the form of class-action lawsuits. (See the Vioxx case with Merck.)
Dawdy also writes: “We are the only group in the psych business that matters. But our interests are not well served in the current power arrangment, in which we don’t even have much of a share or a voice. That is also bullshit and must change.”
I often feel disconnected from the pharmaceutical industry and the world of psychiatry. I am being told things and diagnosed left and right and I don’t understand much of what I’m being told by anybody. My concern is that clinical trial data is being fudged by doctors who receive funding from pharmaceutical companies but fail to disclose their ties. This area needs government regulation and a higher standard of ethical practice. Perhaps the APA should form a bureaucratic board of ethics specifically to overseen the relation between doctors working with (and often for) pharmaceutical companies.
Mood: 4
depression introspection 
Pharma companies have too much pull with normal family doctors and those doctors have too much latitude in prescribing psychiatric medications. They shouldn’t be giving out prescriptions for those at all and should instead refer the patient to a trained psychiatrist.
I think this is another area that needs some oversight.