Fwd: Andrea Yates: In a drug-induced psychosis at the time of the drownings

[Guest guest]

SSRI-Research , JustSayNo wrote:

http://www.redflagsweekly.com/controversy/2002_may27.html

 

Prozac, Suicide and Dr. Healy

 

By Rick Giombetti

 

Dr. David Healy of the Department of Psychological Medicine at the

University of Wales in the UK is hardly a household name in the United

States and that is a shame.

 

One of the world's leading research psychopharmacologists, Healy's

expert

testimony in last year's Paxil civil trial was one of the deciding

factors

in the plaintiff's jury victory in that case. Wyoming resident Donald

Schell, 60, killed his wife, daughter and granddaughter and then

himself

with a gun in 1998 after only two days on Paxil. Schell's surviving

family

members sued Paxil manufacturer UK-based Glaxo-Smith-Kline (GSK), the

world's largest pharmaceutical manufacturer, and won. The decisive

factor in

the case was the company's own internal data demonstrating that they

knew

Paxil could cause agitation and suicidal ideation in research

subjects. A

month after the June verdict in the case, GSK caved in to the British

Medicines Control Agency's request to put a suicide warning on Paxil.

 

The fact that a jury verdict in a civil trial here in the United

States has

led to a suicide warning being put on labels for a popular

psychiatric drug

in another country has hardly been headline news. Two weeks after the

verdict in the Paxil trial, Houston area mother and convicted murderer

Andrea Yates drowned her five children while she was on not one, but

two

antidepressant drugs with strong stimulant profiles. What could have

been an

opportunity for the mass media to educate the public about the

dangers of

antidepressant drugs, instead has been a non-stop awareness campaign

for the

mental health industry about the need for more

psychiatric " treatment. " The

real story that has been missed in the Yates case is the fact that it

is a

story about psychiatric treatment failure. Yates had been getting

psychiatric drugs for her post partum depression for years. She was

on high

doses of two antidepressants drugs at the time she drowned her

children but

went ahead and did what these drugs are supposed to prevent anyway.

 

Meanwhile, Dr. Healy Hasn't shied away from linking Prozac, Paxil and

the

other SSRI's to suicide. He figures at least 250,000 people have

attempted

suicide worldwide because of Prozac alone and that at least 25,000

have

succeeded. He was offered a job at the University of Toronto

affiliated

Center for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in 2000. Healy was

making

arrangements for moving his family to Toronto when he gave a lecture

at the

CAMH on November 30, 2000 where he reiterated his position on Prozac

and

suicide. He also made a lot of other statements, backed up by

statistical

data, that are politically unpopular with many of his psychiatric

colleagues. Such as the fact that psychiatrists have more patients in

their

care then ever before. Healy was unceremoniously turned down for the

CAMH

job. Speculation has it that Prozac manufacturer Indianapolis-base

Eli Lilly

may have had a hand in Healy's firing. An international controversy

has

ensued about Healy's case and the implications it has for academic

freedom

in academic medicine. Healy filed a multi-million dollar breach of

contract

lawsuit against the CAMH and the University of Toronto on September

24 of

last year.

 

A summary of the entire David Healy affair can be read on the

Internet at

http://www.pharmapolitics.com.

 

I recently completed an e-mail interview with Healy about Prozac and

suicide, the CAMH lecture and many other contemporary issues in

psychiatry

today. Below is the transcript.

 

--Rick Giombetti Seattle

 

RG: How do Prozac and the other SSRI's (Selective Serotonin Reuptake

Inhibitors) like Paxil cause suicidal ideation ( " We can make healthy

volunteers belligerent, fearful, suicidal and even pose a risk to

others, "

you wrote in the June 2000 Primary Care Psychiatry. " People don't

care about

the normal consequences as you might expect. They're not bothered

about

contemplating something they would usually be scared of)?

 

DH: There is a greater difference between Prozac and other SSRI's on

the one

side and placebo on the other side in the rate in which they cause

agitation, than there is between Prozac and the other SSRI's and

placebo and

the rate at which they get people who are depressed better(i.e. the

SSRI's

cause more agitation in testing subjects than sugar pills, but they

also

tend to outperform sugar pills at getting depressed people better).

The fact

that companies have chose to market them as antidepressants rather

than

agents that cause agitation is a business decision rather than a

scientific

matter. It is certainly not one that was " ordained by God. " You could

say

that the fact that some people who are depressed get better is a side

effect.

 

These drugs are drugs that primarily work on the serotonin system.

There is

no evidence for any abnormality in the serotonin system in people who

are

depressed. There are however variations in the serotonin system in

people

who are depressed. There are however variations in the serotonin

system in

all of us so that some of us will have quite different effects from

these

drugs than others. It would have been a relatively simple matter to

do work

on this 10 years ago to find out which of us were more likely to have

problems with the drug than which of us were more likely to do well

on them.

 

RG: You testified in the Paxil trial in Wyoming on behalf of the

plaintiffs.

The plaintiff's position in the case, vindicated by both the jury and

judge

in the case, was that Paxil was the primarily responsible for Donald

Schell

shooting his wife, daughter and granddaughter to death before killing

himself with a gun in 1998. Schell had been taking the drug for two

days.

Based on the internal Glaxo-Smith-Kline (Paxil's UK-based

manufacturer and

world's largest pharmaceutical company) documentation you reviewed as

an

expert witness in that case, what would you have to say about Paxil

and

suicide to an individual contemplating a prescription for the drug?

 

DH: The evidence across the board from all of the companies producing

SSRI's

is that their drugs can make 1 in 20 of us agitated to the extent

that we

drop out of trials. This agitation in some cases will include

thoughts of

suicide, self-harm or strange out of character thoughts. The

agitation may

even develop to psychotic proportions.

 

Part of the problem with SSRI's is the they have been prescribed to

many

people by a doctor who may not be aware of these side effects and may

not

have warned you about the side effects. If you then develop problems

on the

drugs you many not link the drug to the problem or you may feel now

that you

have a very severe nervous problem that and your physician is the

only way

out of the problem. A hostage dynamic can develop.

 

There is a particularly difficult scenario where a patient is faced

with a

physician who tells them that any increased nervousness they now have

is not

being cause by their pills and that the answer to this is to continue

with

the pills. In this case many people may not even let the physician

know how

serious this increased nervousness is - as they feel they are not

being

listened to. This situation can arise in part because physicians are

dependent on companies for information about any problems that can be

caused

by the drugs are informed that there is no problem of this kind that

stem

from the drugs, that any problem of this kind stems from the illness.

In

such circumstances where a physician is relying on what they have

been told

by the company and not listening to their patient, there is a real

risk of

things going badly wrong. Some people will only escape disaster if

they halt

their pills.

 

RG: The story of Houston area mother Andrea Yates drowning her five

children

has led to quite a campaign of awareness about mental illness in the

mass

during the past several months. First, it was post-partum depression

and

now, with the recent revelation in the testimony in the Yates' murder

trial

that she believes she is possessed by Satan, schizophrenia. What

hasn't

happened with the Yates case has been an honest accounting of what it

really

is about: Another case of psychiatric treatment failure. Andrea

Yates' post

partum depression had been getting treated with drugs for years and

she was

on two antidepressants at the time she drowned her five children. I'm

not

asking for much from the mass media on the reporting of this case.

Just the

barest mention of two words with this case would be helpful: Effexor

and

Remeron.

 

At the time of the drownings Yates was on 450 mg/day of Effexor, or

75 mg

above the maximum recommended dosage, and 45 mg/day of Remeron, or the

maximum recommended dosage. Yates had been taken off 4 mg/day of the

tranquilizer Haldol two weeks before she drowned the children and the

Remeron was added to her prescription, which continued to include the

Effexor. Now there is a wealth of clinical date out there about these

two

drugs but the media has to look at it instead of helping the mental

health

industry promote mental health awareness.

 

It turns out that a gem of study titled " Mirtazapine (Remeron) Versus

Venlafaxine (Effexor) in Hospitalized Severely Depressed Patients With

Melancholic Features " was published in the August 2001 Journal of

Clinical

Psychopharmacology. It's a gem with regard to the Yates case not only

because it compares two groups of patients put on the same

antidepressant

drugs she was on at the time of the drownings, but because it does

not omit

the fact that concomitant medications were being administered to the

patient/subjects(a rarity for the published results of clinical

studies,

indeed).

 

Out of the group of 78 patient/subjects put on Remeron, 56 percent of

them

were administered the benzodiazepine tranquilizer Oxazepam to counter

agitation and 35 percent were administered the hypnotic Zolpidem to

counter

insomnia. Out of the 79 patient/subjects in the Effexor group, 49

percent

were administered Oxazepam and 41 percent were administered Zolpidem.

Here are the other vital statistics provided by the article: 62.8

percent of

the Remeron group were female and 68.4 percent of the Effexor group

were

female. The maximum dosing of the Remeron group ranged from 45-60

mg/day and

300-375 mg/day for the Effexor group. The study lasted eight weeks

and 23.1

percent of the Remeron group dropped out, plus 35.4 percent of the

Effexor

group dropped out of the study.

 

Well, am I on to something here? Is it unreasonable to suggest that

Yates

was suffering from extreme agitation and/or insomnia, given that she

was

taking high doses of both Effexor and Remeron, and that this might

have been

a factor in her actions the day she drowned her children? What do you

know

about Effexor and Remeron? (Effexor is known as a " Serotonin and

Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitor " or " SNRI " and Remeron is known as a

" Noradrenergic and Specific Serotonergic Antidepressant, " " NaSSA " )

DH: The European tradition had been that all antidepressants could

cause a

problem. This included the tricyclic antidepressants which like

Venlafaxine

(Effexor) inhibited both serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake. The

clinical

trials of Mirtazapine (Remeron) submitted to the FDA that got it a

license

contain an excess of suicides and suicide attempts in those trials

compared

to placebo. I don't know the details for Venlafaxine (Effexor).

Your point about it not being unreasonable to suggest that Yates was

suffering from extreme agitation and/or insomnia on the combination of

Effexor and Remeron is a reasonable one.

 

(At this point Healy thanks me for the reference to the study and

asks me

for the name of the first study author in order to find out more

details

about it -RG)

 

RG: " No Such Thing As An Antidepressant " is the title of one of the

chapters

of Peter Breggin's book The Antidepressant Factbook. Breggin

writes, " Is it

possible that there is no such thing as a genuine antidepressant?

Before the

scientific data had confirmed my suspicions, I doubted that a drug

could

actually 'treat' depression. After all, if depression is a product of

our

conflicts, stressful life experiences, and stifled choices, a drug

would

have no direct effect on treating it. Meanwhile, study after study has

confirmed that antidepressants typically perform only a little better

than

sugar pills. In some studies, antidepressants actually turn out to be

less

effective than the lowly sugar pill. " Breggin then goes on to cite the

clinical data in a review of the performance of seven antidepressants

in 45

clinical trials. Is there such a thing as an antidepressant drug and

is

controlled clinical testing anyway for us to answer this question?

 

DH: The Breggin line that there is no such thing as an antidepressant

because depression arises from conflicts and you couldn't expect a

drug to

treat that does not follow a coherent medical logic. The problem with

a wide

variety of nervous states we are faced with is that we don't know the

origins of these. To say that they arise from conflicts is too

simplistic.

But even if they did arise from conflicts it is not clear that an

entirely

artificial solution that had little to do with conflicts wouldn't be

a way

of treating the problem. In many medical states from broken legs

through to

cardiac problems the answer may be to insert something artificial

like a

metal plate or a plastic valve in order to produce a new modus

vivendi(manner of living). The origins of these problems are not a

deficiency of metal in the leg or plastic in the heart but the metal

in one

case and the plastic in another may provide a workable solution.

However,

having said this antidepressants are not a cure in the sense that

they do

not correct either the biological abnormality that may be involved in

depression or event the biological predisposition to depression. Some

antidepressants are energy enhancing. Others like Zoloft, Prozac and

Paxil

are more anxiolytic(anxiety relieving). This may or may not be

helpful thing

to do in the case of someone who is depressed.

 

Controlled clinical testing doesn't answer the question of whether

there is

such a thing as an antidepressant or not. What trials do is to show

whether

a drug can do something or not. Whether it is wise to then do that

something

or not is an entirely separate question and it is probably the case

that

many clinicians don't take the time to make a clear decision as to the

wisdom of using an antidepressant in the case of each of the patients

that

they ultimately go on to prescribe for. The overwhelming majority of

who are

prescribed antidepressants are at little or no risk for suicide or

other

adverse outcomes from their nervous state. Treatment runs the risk of

stigmatizing the person as well as giving them problems that they

didn't

have to being with.

 

RG: I'm looking at a copy of the August 2001 issue of Primary

Psychiatry. Of

course, it's filled with psychiatric drug ads almost exclusively

featuring

middle-aged and older female models. Most of the models are smiling

widely

because of the happy pills they are on (Effexor, Risperdal, Remeron,

Celexa,

Vivactil). The Zoloft add features a portrait painting of a female

face

filled with anxiety and depression. The Paxil ad features a model

whose face

is filled with anxiety and worry, obviously because she hasn't had a

prescription filled for her happy pill yet(Of course, there is no

suicide

warning anywhere to be found in the ad, which I assume is now

required by

law in the UK). There is one ad featuring a male model for the

narcolepsy

drug Provigil. In one frame the professional looking male model with

thick

glasses is overcome with fatigue. In the next frame he is as happy as

can be

with a wide smile across his face.

 

Has the aggressive marketing of psychiatric drugs as happy pills(to

the

general public as well as doctor's in professional journals) over the

past

decade and-a-half turned MD's into Dr. Feelgoods?

 

DH: I spend a good deal of time cutting out adverts for psychotropic

drugs

to use to illustrate my talks. The marketing of psychiatric drugs and

the

change of climate that this marketing brings about has turned what

used to

be physicians into what lawyers now refer to as pharmacologists. It

has

become standard practice in the US for you to get your drugs from a

pharmacologist and to get therapy from a psychologist or counselor

paid at a

lower rate. This split is, I would have thought, disastrous. It means

that

the people who monitor the impact of therapy on you are not trained

at all

to know about the hazards of that therapy.

 

RG: Out of curiosity, I wonder if you have any analysis and/or

opinion about

Loren Mosher's Soteria experiment (This was an experiment in drug-free

psychiatric treatment conducted under the auspices of the National

Institute

of Mental Health during the '70s. The experiment went well by all

accounts.

It's just that not only was Soteria drug-free, but Mosher staffed the

experiment with non-professional counselors. Soteria was quickly

defunded

and forgotten by the late '70s). I bring this up because I don't

recall it

being mentioned in The Anti-depressant Era and it is a case often

brought up

by critics of the politicization of clinical testing in psychiatry

(The most

recent example being Robert Whitaker's book Mad In America).

 

DH: Unfortunately, although I have recently met Loren Mosher, I

haven't

analyzed or come up with a view on the Soteria experiment. This is an

omission, particularly in the light of the fact that I have a new

book out

from Harvard University Press this month on the antipsychotics called

The

Creation of Psychopharmacology. It picks up many of the issues

touched on in

a variety of your questions but unfortunately not Mosher's Soteria

Experiment.

 

It sounds like Whittaker's book Mad in America is one that I need to

get.

RG: At the press conference announcing your lawsuit against the

University

of Toronto and the CAMH, you said that any punitive damages you might

win in

your suit would be put into an academic trust fund. The reaction to

the

events of September 11 has lead to new threats to academic freedom.

For

example, a Palestinian professor was recently fired from his tenured

position at the University of South Florida and calls for the firing

of

University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen solely for his

anti-war beliefs have been made (here in Seattle by right-wing talk

radio

host Michael Medved). How would such an academic freedom trust fund

be made

available to professors who believe their academic freedom has been

violated?

 

DH: I have no idea how academics suffering from violations of academic

freedom post-September the 11th would be able to access an Academic

Freedom

Trust Fund into which I've made contributions. I have no idea for the

simple

reason that if there is money that results from the lawsuit I will be

handing it over to others to manage and would not wish to have any

say on

how it should be accessed or who should be able to access it. My

plans would

be to walk away from the management of any such funds so that no one

could

argue that I was using it to further my own ends.

 

The CAMH Lecture

 

RG: In The Antidepressant Era you took exception to Breggin's

argument in

Toxic Psychiatry that pharmaceutical companies exercise undue

influence over

research and the medical literature that gets published. Has your

treatment

by the CAMH changed your position on the influence of the

pharmaceutical

industry over research and academic freedom in publication?

DH: The Antidepressant Era is all about the extraordinary influence

that

pharmaceutical companies can have over research and the medical

literature.

The difference between the position I take in this book and Peter

Breggin's

argument is that I believe that psychotropic drugs can be helpful

where he

seems to think that physical treatments generally are both unhelpful

and

ethically dubious. My treatment by the CAMH hasn't altered my

perceptions on

this issue.

 

RG: At the beginning of the CAMH lecture you mentioned a couple of the

crucial laws passed during the 20th century that were landmarks in

the " War

On Drugs " here in the United States (The 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act,

which

made the opiates and cocaine available by prescription only and the

1951

Humphrey-Durham Amendment to the 1938 Food, Drugs and Cosmetics Act,

which

made the new antibiotics, anihypertensives, antipsychotics,

antidepressants,

anxiolytics and other drugs, available by prescription only).

I argue I should have the right to go across the street to the coffee

shop I

frequent and have my afternoon cup of coffee spiked with 5 mg of

Ritalin or

5 mg of Prozac or 5 mg of Remeron or 5 mg of Cocaine or whatever I

want.

It's laws like the one mentioned above that stand in the way of me

being

able to do this. Furthermore, my government shouldn't be granting

exclusive

patents over drugs I paid to develop. Public Citizen has pointed out

that

the majority of the costs of brining a prescription drug to the

market is

put up by tax payers and our reward for this is to have to pay the the

extortionately high prices for drugs made possible by exclusive

patents. In

a decriminalized free market, I don't have to pay the Mob's high drug

prices

or have the blessing of a doctor to take a drug. I can report any

adverse

event I might experience to a doctor without fear of legal sanction

against

me. If the FDA made adverse event reporting mandatory for doctors and

adverse event forms widely available to the public for the purpose of

voluntary reporting, then researchers could probably get more good

data on

drugs than they currently do from the clinical testing controlled by

the

pharmaceutical industry.

 

What is your opinion of a free market for drugs (I ask because you

mentioned

in The Antidepressant Era the fact that you could prescribe anything

you

want for yourself while your patients don't have this privilege)?

DH: My use of the idea of making all these drugs available over the

counter

was as a thought experiment to try and bring home to people how much

prescription only status channels us down a disease model. This shows

up

clearly in the difference between the marketing of St John's Wort and

the

marketing of Prozac. You can get St John's Wort to treat yourself for

stress

and burnout, to get Prozac you have to be made depressed. There are

implications for this.

 

There are a whole lot of other ways to solve many of the problems we

have

however. One would be to insist that pharmaceutical companies have to

make

their data and not just their trials publicly available. It would be a

simple matter to say that the data is inherently unscientific while it

remains proprietary. There is no other branch of science in which the

raw

data remains inaccessible to investigators generally and indeed

essentially

to the public.

 

The whole area of how to handle drug misuse etc. is a complex and

fraught

one. I see my role in the debate as trying to bring certain angles of

the

problem to light, angles that are not ordinarily commented on. I don't

presume to know the answers.

 

RG (The following are two question for Healy that are answered below)

" Coming from my perspective the antipsychiatry arguments that madness

does

not really exist are simply wrong. " All right, then define what a

mental

disorder is. Your colleagues at the American Psychiatric Association

haven't

helped with this issue with each new edition of their burgeoning

Diagnostic

and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Having read about a third

of the

DSM-IV-TR so far, it's easy to see the politics and difficult to see

the

science driving the most popular diagnoses such as AD/HD for unruly

school

boys, Delusional Disorder of both the Grandiose and Persecutory Type

for the

homeless or JFK assassination conspiracy buffs, Generalized Anxiety

Disorder

for middle and upper income women, etc., etc.,.

 

" In the same way fear of God was once seen as a good thing that held

social

order in place. The fear then became anxiety and anxiety disorders -

something to treat. What this shows is that there are forces at play,

that

can change not only the kinds of drugs we give, not only the

conditions we

think we are treating, but our very selves who are doing the giving.

Forces

that can change us more profoundly than we can be changed by a

handful of

LSD containing dust, " you said near the end of the CAMH lecture. You

are

sounding a lot like Thomas Szasz here(author of the " Myth of Mental

Illness " ) yet you don't see eye to eye with him on the existence of

madness.

I mean something like the above quote suggests that mental disorder

has been

invented to replace the Church in managing social order, i.e. Szasz's

" Therapeutic State. " Elaborate further on what mean by the above quote

because something like it could confuse people about your position on

these

issues.

 

DH: In the case of Thomas Szasz he was arguing that it was

unreasonable to

say that psychoneuroses were diseases. I agree with him. However I

have not

been a psychotherapist earning my living out of treating minor mental

disorders. I'm at the coalface in a District General Hospital setting

managing psychoses. Many of these patients can end up in states of

rigid

immobility that we know can last for months or years if left

untreated.

Others are consumed by nihilistic delusions of various sorts. Yet

others

have thought disorder of a kind that most clinical observers looking

at it

have said indicates frontal lobe dysfunction. It is these states that

I am

happy to say look like real diseases.

 

Saying that these look like real diseases does not mean that they

have to be

treated with physical means. I am happy to respect a person or their

families wish to leave the state untreated. I also believe that when

we

finally understand the biological underpinnings of things this will

put us

in a better position to know how to handle many of these states by

non-physical means. Genetic testing for disorders like

phenylketonuria makes

it possible to avoid the damage that this illness causes by simply

managing

your diet properly.

 

I believe the real concern the antipsychiatrists had was not so much

whether

mental illness was real or not, but rather a concern at the extension

of the

psychiatric reach out into the community that took place in the

1960s. Who

were these guys who were telling us how to live our lives - what

training do

they have in how to live life.

 

If you read The Creation of Psychopharmacology you realize that the

origins

of operational criteria as found in DSMIII and IV etc etc are not

because

the people who came up with the idea of operational criteria knew

what these

diseases really were. Operational criteria are a confession of

ignorance.

They do not legitimate the existence of any of the disease entities

that

people are particularly keen about nowadays.

 

RG: One of the more controversial aspects of the CAMH lecture was your

assertion that psychiatric patients in Britain are being detained at

3 times

the rate today than they were 50 years ago. What prompted me to

contact you

was a report about suicide in the UK I read at Organon's

<PsychiatryMatters.md> website back in January(Organon is the

manufacturer

of Remeron). The report stated that the number of patients being

admitted to

John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxfordshire for self inflicted harm had

increased

from 1,000 per year in 1990 to 1,600 per year by the end of the

decade. The

annual suicide rate for men aged 15-24 in the UK increased from 10

deaths

per 1,000 in 1983 to 15 deaths per 1,000 in 1992. Today the suicide

rate for

young men in the UK is double what it was in 1968. Do these kinds of

statistics buttress your argument that psychiatrists now have more

patients

in their care than ever before? Could one argue that this is an

example of

treatment failure on the part of psychiatry(The 60 percent increase in

suicide admissions at one hospital in the UK during the '90s, a

decade when

medical science had purportedly made on revolutionary pharmacological

break

through after another in the treatment of depression, hardly comes

across as

something for psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry to write home

about, much less to use as the basis for bankrolling awareness

campaigns

about the need for people to seek " treatment " for depression)?

(Healy provided me with the text of a lecture he gave at the

University of

Toronto a year ago. This lecture went over the statistical data

underlying

Healy's claim that psychiatrists are treating more patients than ever

before. It compares admission statistics at North Wales Hospital in

1896 to

1996. The implications from the data are clear enough. Patients in

1996 were

being discharged from the hospital with prescriptions for neuroleptic

and

antidepressant drugs that can cause agitation and suicidal ideation.

This

may be the reason why the 1996 patients have much higher suicide

rates than

the 1896 patients. The most embarrassing implication of all for modern

psychiatry is that psychiatric patients of 1896 may very well have had

better outcomes in the area of death rates than patients of 1996 when

the

lack of antibiotics in 1896 are taken into account. One conclusion to

draw

from this data is clear: psychiatric patients at North Wales Hospital

in

1896 were dying primarily from physical causes while a century later

they

were dying far more often from self inflicted harm. A major

indictment of

the claim that the past half-century has been a golden age in the

treatment

of psychiatric illness. I would recommend everybody interested in this

subject e-mail Healy for a word copy of this interesting lecture at:

 

Healy_Hergest@c...

 

RG: You noted the unceremonious retirement of Thorazine's co-

discoverer Jean

Delay. His office was ransacked during the May 1968 strikes and

protests in

Paris and that at the time " he has no sympathy for the new world, in

which

students can expect to address the professors in informal terms. " You

go on

to argue that " Both psychiatry and antipsychiatry were swept away by

a new

corporate psychiatry. Galbraith argues that we no longer have free

markets;

corporations work out what they have to sell and then prepare the

market so

that we will want those products. It works for cars, oil, and

everything

else, why would it not work for psychiatry? Prescription only status

makes

the psychiatric market easier than almost any other market - only a

comparatively few hearts and minds need to be won. "

 

Do you think your firing by the CAMH and your suspicions that Eli

Lilly had

a hand in it vindicates your argument about the take over of the

profession

by what you call corporate psychiatry?

 

DH: I have never voiced suspicions that Eli Lilly had a hand in my

firing

from CAMH. Lots of other people have voiced those suspicions. Yet

others

again have made strong cases for the possibilities that Pfizer or

SmithKline

may have brought influence to bear on this issue.

 

It's a bit too early to judge whether my firing by CAMH gives a good

indication of where the profession of psychiatry generally is at.

Leaving my

case aside however I think the takeover by corporate psychiatry is fai