Big Pharma's Latest Shady Ploy to Sell Depression Drugs That People May Not Need

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Big Pharma's Latest Shady Ploy to Sell Depression Drugs That People May Not Need

by Martha Rosenberg  •  July 4, 2011



The discovery that many people with life problems or occasional bad moods would

willingly dose themselves with antidepressants sailed the drug industry through

the 2000s. A good chunk of the $4.5 billion a year direct-to-consumer

advertising has been devoted to convincing people they don’t have problems

with their job, the economy and their family, they have depression. Especially

because depression can’t be diagnosed from a blood test.

Unfortunately, three things dried up the depression gravy train for the drug

industry. Blockbusters went off patent and generics took off, antidepressants

were linked with gory and unpredictable violence, especially in young users and

— they didn’t even work, according to medical articles!

That’s when the drug industry began debuting the concept of “treatment

resistant depression.†It wasn’t that their drugs didn’t work (or you

didn’t have depression in the first place), you had “treatment resistant

depression.†Your first expensive and dangerous drug needed to be coupled

with more expensive and dangerous drugs because monotherapy, one drug alone,

wasn’t doing the trick!

You’ve got to admire the drug industry’s audacity with this upsell strategy.

Adding drugs to your treatment resistant depression triples its take, patients

don’t know which drug is working so they’ll take all of them and the

defective drugs are exonerated!  (Because the problem is you.)

Now the drug industry has a new whisper campaign to keep the antidepressant boat

afloat. Your depression is “progressive.â€

Once upon a time, when depression was neither seasonal, atypical, bipolar or

treatment resistant, it was considered to be a self-limiting disease. In fact,

just about the only good thing you could say about depression was it wouldn’t

last forever.

But now, the drug industry is giving depression the don’t-wait scare treatment

like coronary events (statins), asthma attacks (â€controller†drugs) and

thinning bones (Sally Field). If you don’t hurry and take medication, your

depression will get worse!

“Depressive episodes become more easily triggered over time,†floats an

article on the physician Web site Medscape (flanked by ads for the

antidepressant Pristiq.) “As the number of major depressive episodes increase,

the risk for subsequent episodes is predicted more from the number of prior

episodes and less from the occurrence of a recent life stress.†The article,

unabashedly titled “Neurobiology of Depression: Major Depressive Disorder as a

Progressive Illness,†is written by Vladimir Maletic who happens to have

served on Eli Lilly’s Speaker’s Bureau, says the disclosure information, and

whose co-authors are each employees and/or Lilly shareholders.

On WebMD, a sister site to Medscape, the depression sell is even less subtle. An

article called Recognizing the Symptoms of Depression, smothered with five ads

for the Eli Lilly antidepressant, Cymbalta, submits, “Most of us know about

the emotional symptoms of depression. But you may not know that depression can

be associated with many physical symptoms, too.â€

Depression may masquerade as headaches, insomnia, fatigue, backache, dizziness,

lightheadedness or appetite problems mongers the article. “You might feel

queasy or nauseous. You might have diarrhea or become chronically

constipated.†And here, you thought it was something you ate!

The danger with these symptoms says the article is that you would fail to

diagnose yourself as suffering from a psychiatric problem and buy an

over-the-counter drug like a normal person. “Because these symptoms occur with

many conditions, many depressed people never get help, because they don’t know

that their physical symptoms might be caused by depression. A lot of doctors

miss the symptoms, too.â€

But when head and backaches aren’t labeled as depression, the drug industry

make no money and insurance rates could stop climbing from over-treatment with

unnecessary, expensive and dangerous psychoactive drugs!

To prevent such goring of marketshare, the article (whose content was

“selected and controlled by WebMD’s editorial staff and is funded by Lilly

USA,†an original WebMD financial partner according to the Washington Post)

counselsworry about physical symptoms. “Don’t assume they’ll go away on

their own.†Symptoms may “need additional treatment†and “some

antidepressants, such as Cymbalta and Effexor, may help with chronic pain,

too.â€

Before direct-to-consumer advertising, the health care system was devoted to

preventing over-treatment and assuring patients they were probably okay. Who

remembers “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning�  Now patients are

assured they probably aren’t okay but probably have a progressive disease.

Luckily their disease can be treated with progressive prescriptions from pharma.

Martha Rosenberg frequently writes about the impact of the pharmaceutical, food

and gun industries on public health. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe,

San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and other outlets.

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