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The Influence of Pharmaceutical Companies and Restoring Integrity to Psychiatric Research and Practice

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Critical Psychiatry

Abstract

A growing concern across all areas of medicine is that commercial interests are undermining the medical profession’s culture and public health mission. The absence of biological markers for psychiatric conditions makes psychiatry more vulnerable to industry influence and, concomitantly, to overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Although we discuss conflicts of interest, we use the more robust framework of institutional corruption to understand the economies of influence and problematic incentive structures that have had a distorting effect on psychiatric research and practice. We provide specific examples of these distortions and discuss their implications (e.g., how the DSM-5 may have inadvertently functioned as a vehicle for high-profit patent extensions). Suggestions for how the profession can work to inoculate itself from commercial influences are offered.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It should be emphasized that many trials were running before the DSM-5 was published. In other words, clinical trials were being run to test drugs for disorders that did not yet officially exist (e.g., binge eating disorder, mild neurocognitive disorder, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, bereavement-related depression). Certainly, pharmaceutical companies would be delighted by the official inclusion of new DSM disorders; obtaining 3 more years of exclusivity for drugs capable of generating over US$1 billion in sales is a boon to industry.

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  1. Department of Counseling Psychology, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Boston, MA, USA

    Lisa Cosgrove & Akansha Vaswani

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  1. Lisa Cosgrove
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    Sandra Steingard

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Cosgrove, L., Vaswani, A. (2019). The Influence of Pharmaceutical Companies and Restoring Integrity to Psychiatric Research and Practice. In: Steingard, S. (eds) Critical Psychiatry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02732-2_3

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