How has Big Pharma managed to get so many children on expensive drug cocktails for "mental illness"? Drugs that they may not even need?
Big Pharma has spent millions on public relations campaigns that tell parents, teachers and clinicians to dose children at the first sign of problems. It knows if parents treat their kids early they will never know if the kids needed the drugs in the first place and whether residual problems are "mental illness" or drug side effects. The kids will also probably be life long customers because parents will be afraid to take them off the drugs. No wonder Pharma tells parents not to wait for "excessive energy" or "mood swings" to go away in the awareness campaigns. Ka-ching.
One "prescribe early" campaign for the atypical antipsychotic Risperdal uses a macabre abandoned wallet, a teddy bear, and keys on a barren street "to reposition a drug that was being used too late to achieve its maximum benefits," said its advertising agency, Torre Lazur McCann. Brand managers for Seroquel, a competing antipsychotic, even considered creating Winnie-the-Pooh characters like Tigger (bipolar) and Eeyore (depressed) to sell Seroquel, according to published reports, at an AstraZeneca sales meeting. Parents say they have seen toys emblazoned with Seroquel logos.
Only one child in ten thousand has pediatric schizophrenia - some say one in thirty thousand - but that doesn't stop Gabriele Masi, MD, with the Stella Maris Institute for Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatry at the University of Pisa in Italy from portraying it as a public health problem. In an article titled "Children with Schizophrenia: Clinical Picture and Pharmacological Treatment," in the journal
CNS Drugs, Masi writes, "Awareness of childhood- onset schizophrenia is rapidly increasing, with a more precise definition now available of the clinical picture and early signs, the outcome and the treatment strategies."
Symptoms of childhood schizophrenia include "social deficits" and "delusions . . . related to childhood themes," writes Masi. What child doesn't have "social deficits"? Do delusions include imaginary playmates? Masi lambastes the "hesitancy on the part of clinicians to make a diagnosis of schizophrenia," instead of prescribing early. Masi has received research funding from Eli Lilly, served as an advisor for Shire and been on speakers bureaus for Sanofi Aventis, AstraZeneca, GSK, and Janssen, all of which manufacture many of the leading psychiatric drugs for children, according to the
American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.It's tempting to ridicule Pharma funded doctors who find mental illness and even relapses and "treatment resistance" in people who have been on the planet for forty months. But pathologizing three-year-olds isn't funny. Both four-year-old Rebecca Riley of Hull, Massachusetts, and three-year- old Destiny Hager of Council Grove, Kansas, died in 2006 from psychiatric drugs that included Geodon and Seroquel to treat their "bipolar disorders." And in 2009, seven-year-old Gabriel Myers of Broward County, Florida, a child in a state facility, hung himself while on Symbyax, a pill that combines Zyprexa and Prozac. If it weren't for Big Pharma's prescribe early campaigns, these children, and others, might still be alive. END
Martha Rosenberg's is an investigative health reporter. She is the author of Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health (Prometheus).
I have been spending the last three weeks of weekday afternoons standing outside CCHR's traveling exhibit in Seattle trying to get people to go inside and get informed about this.
Most of the people who look like they are part of the corporate world walk by me like I'm not there. And there are a LOT of them, even in a "hip" neighborhood in Seattle.
Most of the people who look like hippies or regular working people are interested, though some think they already know about it and others don't have the time.
And then of course, there are the homeless, the wayward kids, the therapists and the criminals. There are a lot of them, too. Most of them, of course, are involved in the "mental health" system, either on the victim side or the victimizer side, or maybe both. They are usually angry or too out of it to care.
One of the questions people who are interested ask is: Why is this happening? We try to answer that in our exhibit, but it isn't easy to understand, and it isn't even easy to believe. It's too evil.
And it's very rarely that I hear anyone ask: How do we solve this?
Are we too late?