Dr. David Healy, the controversial doctor who was hired, then fired, then hired again by U of T after he questioned the safety of antidepressants, addressed a conference on Wednesday in honour of World Mental Health Day. He made the keynote address on “Marketing Madness: How Pharmaceutical Companies Shape the Way We Think” to an audience of several hundred people at George Brown College.
“They’re marketing the illness, they’re not just marketing the pills,” he told the crowd. Dr. Healy has become an outspoken critic of the pharmaceutical industry’s marketing strategies since 2000, when he was embroiled in a fight over academic freedom with the U of T Department of Psychiatry. Having been appointed a professor of psychiatry in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders program, Healy was abruptly dropped by the university after giving a speech which linked antidepressents such as Prozac and Zoloft to mental health patients who had committed suicide while on the drugs.
Three years and a messy lawsuit later, Healy is now a visiting professor at U of T’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). His talk illustrated how the pharmaceutical industry markets antidepressants, and how those drugs are frequently used in cases where they might not be appropriate.
“The illnesses are real, the stress that people feel from them is real, and the treatments do work,” he said. “But we’re in this area where ‘what I call it is what it becomes.’ In an effort to move the product, to change the way you feel and think, the drug companies found it was more profitable to do that than to actually treat serious illnesses.” Healy cited Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and Depression as conditions for which pharmaceutical companies have developed “lifestyle drugs” which may be inappropriate for most patients.
A panel discussion and audience questions followed. The panelists who responded to Healy’s presentation were Don Wasylenki, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at U of T, and Lana Fredo, a Toronto mental-health advocate. The discussion centred around establishing standards of ethics for physicians when dealing with pharmaceutical companies.
“We found a very broad and disturbing diversity of views on the ethics of these marketing scenarios,” Wasylenki said, “despite the fact that there are clearly defined standards of ethics established. There really is no accountability for physicians, no consequences for breaking those standards.”
“We’re going to teach our students to use the same critical skills in approaching industry-sponsored marketing that they bring to scientific research,” Wasylenki added.
One man in the audience asked a question which made vague references to eugenics, the holocaust, the Rockefeller Foundation, and “fifth columnists” working within Canada. Other audience members rambled and had to be cut off by the moderator, Elizabeth Gray of the CBC.
The conference continued in the afternoon when Dr. Healy was interviewed by Suhana Meharchand of the CBC.
Healy has recently published a new book, Let Them Eat Prozac, an examination of how antidepressants have been marketed to the public and to physicians.
On the subject of his new working relationship with CAMH, Healy said “U of T is one of the major universities in the world and I’m really keen to continue working with them.”
Regarding his role as the thorn in the pharmaceutical industry’s side, Healy said he wasn’t looking for his newfound celebrity: “I’m not doing it out of any great desire-I would be happy to slink off and hide in the corner like everybody else, but I had to defend myself on this issue and raise the profile of it. I slipped into this.”
