Remember...

when the book, Listening to Prozac came out back in 1993? Remember the notion that it could make people better versions of themselves? I was deeply skeptical then and I confess to feeling a bit of schadenfreude over the current state of affairs in psychopharmacology.  This week David Healy posted a wonderful piece on the 25th anniversary of Prozac. He concludes: Twenty-five years ago, no one could have imagined that the bulk of the treatment literature would be ghostwritten, that negative trials could be portrayed as glowingly positive studies of a drug, that controlled trials could have been transformed into a gold-standard method to hide adverse events, or that dead bodies could have been hidden from medical academics so easily.  Twenty-five years ago no one would have believed that a drug less effective for nerves or melancholia than heroin, alcohol or older and cheaper antidepressants could have been brought on the market and that almost as a matter of national policy people would be encouraged to take it for life. Still I wonder how long the iron grip of Big Pharma and biopsychiatry will keep mental health will last?
Source: Jung At Heart - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs