If everyone has the ill, then all must take the pill. Already huge, the market in psychotropic drugs is constantly growing. When the adult market seemed saturated, the drug companies expanded their customer demographics by pushing product onto children -- it is not by accident that all the recent epidemics of psychiatric disorder have occurred in kids. And children are particularly choice customers -- bring them on board early, and you may have them for life. At the other end of the life cycle, companies targeted the elderly, selling antipsychotics like hotcakes in nursing homes. Pharma has not been constrained by the fact that children and the elderly are the two most difficult demographic groups to diagnose accurately or that they are the most vulnerable to harmful drug side effects or that excessive use of antipsychotics in nursing homes results in increased mortality. And, even more troubling, it is the very most vulnerable of kids who get the most medicine -- those who are economically disadvantaged or in foster care.
Seven percent of Americans are now addicted to a legal psychotropic drug. Prescription drug abuse has become a bigger problem than illicit drug abuse. If there is a conceivable way to sell a new diagnosis so that people will incorrectly believe they have it, drug companies will have figured it out and will do it successfully -- if sometimes illegally. Big Pharma seems to feel above the law. Almost all of the companies have absorbed huge fines and even criminal penalties as punishment for their illegal sales practices.
Allen Frances, M.D, "Saving Normal," p.95
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