The biggest puzzle is the huge success of antipsychotic drugs. Despite their dangerous side effect and narrow indications, they are being given out like candy. Antipsychotics have proven usefulness only in treating the disabling symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but this has not stopped drug company seduction promoting their general use for anyone having trouble sleeping, or run-of-the-mill anxiety, or depression, or irritability, or eccentricity, or the temper tantrums of youth, or the crankiness of old age. More than 3 million Americans are already on board, with a (shareholder satisfying) growth rate of 20 percent a year. The number of prescriptions for antipsychotics has doubled in ten years, up to 54 million and counting. Off-label use has also doubled—undeterred by the big fines that don’t seem so big when you consider the ill-gotten gains they enable. How could this happen? Big bucks. An advertising budget of $2.4 billion per year spent on Abilify and Seroquel has catapulted these two very so-so and not-so-safe drugs to fifth and sixth place as revenue producers among all of the many medications sold in America. The full court press on primary care doctors as them inappropriately prescribing an antipsychotic for 20 percent of all their anxiety disorder patients. This massive misuse of antipsychotics is crazy and shameful—a triumph of marketing might over common sense and good medical practice.
Allen Frances, M.D, "Saving Normal," pg.105
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