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[bibliogramma]

Selling Sickness, Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels

The subtitle of this book is “How the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies are turning us all into patients.” And I think it paints a very accurate picture of what is going on, at least in North America.

Just to be perfectly clear – because I know very well what it feels like to know that you have a real health issue only to be told that you don’t – the authors are not arguing that actual medical conditions, whether “physical” or “mental” in scope, should be ignored or that there are people for whom the risk/benefit analysis of prescribing medications and doesn’t come down soundly on the side of medical intervention.

What the authors are looking at is how, in the service of increased profits, pharmaceutical companies have spent years and millions of dollars in redefining the populations who “need” medical intervention to the point that perfectly healthy people have been convinced that they are sick, and moderately unhealthy people – for whom the risk/benefit analysis suggests that doing nothing, or seeking out non-pharmaceutical treatments, is safer than taking the drugs being marketed to them – are being urged by doctors to take prescription drugs rather than make other decisions that carry fewer risks.

As the authors say in their prologue:

The ups and downs of daily life have become mental disorders, common complaints are transformed into frightening conditions, and more and more ordinary people are turned into patients.... Rightly rewarded for saving life and reducing suffering, the global drug giants are no longer content selling medicines only to the ill, because as Wall Street knows, there’s a lot more money to be made telling healthy people they are sick.

The book looks at the many ways that the pharmaceutical-medical complex “creates” new diseases – by renaming personality traits such as shyness with terms such as “social anxiety disorder,” by recalibrating diagnostic scales so that what was considered within the normal range is now indicative of disease, as has been done with cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and body weight measurements such as the BMI; and by identifying normal human responses to stress or evolutionary abnormal conditions, such as adult-onset attention deficit disorder among frustrated, bored and undervalued office workers or depression among people experiencing stresses that are the result of repressive social conditions and policies.

Actually, I’d go further than the authors and state quite explicitly that the use of a number of pharmaceuticals, particularly those packaged as treatments for depression, anxiety, adult ADD and other such psychological or emotional conditions, is being deliberately encouraged as a means of social control. What better way to keep people from taking action to demand social justice than to convince them that their feelings of frustration, anxiety, alienation, anomie, insecurity, boredom, hopelessness, fatigue – to mention just a few – are symptoms of a personal problem that can be easily solved with a simple prescription? If for just one moment the people were to suspect that what’s wrong with them has nothing to do with their own mental state, and a great deal to do with the stresses of living in a repressive capitalist state that ignores the needs of the people in favour of the profits of the corporations – well, good heavens, there could be a revolution.