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

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.”

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 (”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.”

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.”