Marching to “Pharmageddon”: Psychopharmacy Unmasked

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is the kingpin itself—psychiatric drugs. Indeed, to a degree, all along, this journey has been about psychiatric drugs, with the picture becoming progressively clearer that psychiatric drugging is the very essence of psychiatric “treatment,” moreover, that the role of the pharmaceuticals is duplicitous and deleterious. In the very first chapter, significantly, we probed the situation of a young man called Kevin, who killed himself because of the plight to which psychiatric drugs had brought him. Kevin’s story, you will recall, functioned not merely anecdotally but as a disjuncture. In typical IE (institutional ethnography) fashion, we proceeded to use Kevin’s story as a entry point into the system. Come Chapter Three, we saw the drugs emerge as a guarantor of the medical model, which in turn guarantees medical dominance. In this and subsequent chapters, correspondingly, we explored the contours of the drug revolution, the pharmaceutical industry-generated conflicts of interest, the nature of the underlying research on which pharmaceutical dominance is built, the place of the pharmaceutical industry in the “mental health system.” This chapter rests on what has been already established.

“Pharmageddon” is in quotation marks because it is part of the title of Healy’s groundbreaking book on the drug approval process. See Healy (2012).