Anti-Depressants Being Over-Marketed, Visiting Lecturer Says

Ioana Patringenaru | December 10, 2007

Dr. David Healy spoke Dec. 4 at UCSD.

The anti-depressant ad is from the 1960s and shows an elderly woman, looking extremely unhappy. Now here is another, from the 1990s, showing a much younger woman, perhaps in her late 20s or early 30s. The contrast between the two ads, Dr. David Healy argued Tuesday at UCSD, highlights the pharmaceutical industry’s relentless efforts to market depression, and the drugs to cure it, to a broader audience in recent years.

“They’re trying to sell the illness in order to get their drugs to sell,” said Healy, a professor of psychiatry at Cardiff University in England.

He gave a talk titled “The Human Laboratory: The Making and Marketing of Psychoactive Drugs” Dec. 4 at the Institute of the Americas. He is the author of more than 140 peer-reviewed articles and 15 books, including “The Antidepressant Era” and “Let Them Eat Prozac.” He also has served as an expert witness in homicide and suicide trials involving a class of anti-depressant drugs known as SSRIs. The lecture was sponsored by the UCSD Science Studies Program, 

Healy cautioned that he isn’t opposed to prescribing these drugs. “I don’t want you to take out of this talk that I am hostile to drugs,” he said. “But all the marketing you see here shows that drugs aren’t used judiciously.”

Healy traces the heavy marketing of drugs to the 1990s, when anti-depressant sales started to rise and overtake sales of drugs used to treat anxiety. During that same period, ads for anti-depressants started featuring younger and younger women. At the same time, Healy said, the number of stories about depression featured in U.S. magazines went up dramatically, as did the number of articles reviewing anti-depressant drugs in medical journals.

Healy argued anti-depressants are over-marketed.

As a result, Americans started to view themselves as clinically depressed, instead of viewing themselves as anxious, Healy added. He pointed out that this dramatic rise in anti-depressant sales didn’t take place in most of the rest of the world.

He also said he now see the same trend taking place to market drugs for attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder, as well as drugs for bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive disorder. Pharmaceutical companies are marketing a new category of drugs as mood stabilizers, though at this point in time, they’re only approved for treating bipolar disorder, Healy said.

Another dangerous trend, he added, is the marketing of drugs to younger and younger patients, including teenagers and children. To this day, most of the rest of the world believes that symptoms of bipolar disorder rarely show up in life’s early years, in adolescence, Healy said. But in the United States, books have been promoting the idea that children can suffer from the disorder. He cited the example of a 2-year-old girl who died after being put on drugs for ADHD, depression, then bipolar disorder.

Healy ended his talk by urging physicians and the public to be aware of these trends. He also urged his audience to demand more transparency from the pharmaceutical industry. Scientists created new drugs to improve the human condition, but that is now in jeopardy, he said.

“We moved forward the compass of human freedom,” Healy told his audience. “But the process has been corrupted.”