California Official Accuses Bristol Bristol-Myers Squibb of Bribing Doctors to Prescribe Drugs

Pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb bribed thousands of California doctors and pharmacists to promote its drugs, using illegal kickbacks, lavish gifts and “happy hours” with the Los Angeles Lakers to expand its market share in the state, state officials said.

California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones announced Friday that his office had joined a previously sealed whistleblower lawsuit against the company, calling it the largest health insurance fraud case ever pursued by a California state agency.

Two of the three whistleblowers in the case are former Lakers player Lucius Allen and his wife, Eve, who worked for the drug company as employees and provided access to the basketball team, whose players participated in “Lakers Dream Camps” set up by the drug company for doctors and their family members, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit was filed in 2007 but was sealed until the state joined the case recently.

Shrinks on the couch as they ponder who is and is not crazy

SOME psychiatrists — the ones who don’t believe they are godlike creatures — are in a bit of a tizz these days. They are worried about all the damage they might have unwittingly done by misdiagnosing mental illness. Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi could help to ease their furrowed brows. Some background, before I explain that apparent non-sequitur: In a soul-searching analysis of his profession in Wired magazine recently, US psychiatrist Dr Allen Frances declares that mental disorders “can’t be defined”, and it’s “bull—-” to suggest otherwise. Frances is lead editor of the DSM-IV, the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It’s a publication that has been described as “the bible” and “the imperial doctrine” of psychiatrists.

It’s what shrinks use, in their godlike wisdom, to decide whether or not you are mentally ill — and then to prescribe powerful, dangerous drugs, and other treatments that can turn you into a shadow of your former self. In the gut-wrenching Wired article, Frances says: “We psychiatrists have made mistakes that had terrible consequences.”

In Ireland: No Consent for 12% of those getting electroshocked

Electroshock is the “treatment” psychiatrists employ when their first line of “treatment”— drugs—fail to work. And the drugs inevitably fail to work, simply because they are no more effective than placebo, yet have side effects rivaling the most hardcore street drugs. In the U.S. alone, more than 100,000 people are electroshocked every year, and the majority of people being shocked are the elderly. But psychiatrists also don’t exclude pregnant women and children from being electroshocked. Hard to believe, but true. And what’s more, psychiatrists are pushing harder than ever for increases in electroshock treatment, recently lobbying the U.S. FDA to downgrade electroshock machines from the most high risk category of device (Class III) to Class II. They failed.

Profiting from mental ill-health

There’s a reason psychiatrists prescribe drugs rather than talking therapy: the latter makes no money for pharmaceutical firms. The New York Times recently led with a front-page splash about psychiatry’s propensity to prescribe pills, “Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy”. That news is already widely known in the mental health field, but it has vast ramifications for Americans trying to maintain their sanity in our market-driven and medical system for delivering mental healthcare. What does the turn to drug therapy mean for the mass of Americans?

Dr. Peter Breggin, psychiatrist—”Join the Empathic Transformation”

As the recent New York Times story confirms, most psychiatrists don’t even do psychotherapy anymore; they simply diagnose and drug. As I first described in Toxic Psychiatry, medically-oriented mental health professionals have become remote from their patients whom they now seek to manipulate chemically rather than to know personally.

In the field we call mental health, the rampant diagnosing, drugging, and incarcerating of those we seek to help must be replaced by practices that encourage responsibility and freedom rather than compliance and docility. By working directly in the field of ethical human services and sciences, we can become a leading part in the grassroots movement we call the Empathic Transformation.

All over the world, those of us who practice the healing arts–physical, psychological and spiritual–are seeing the need to join together to further humanity’s empathic transformation–to transform the old ways into something better and even grander, into practices embedded in and imbued with empathy.

The world is changing and we need to lead the movement in our fields toward a view of human beings that never demeans and always empowers, that never forces but always encourages, and that recognizes that human beings are not ultimately driven by their instincts and their biochemical but by their ideals and principles.

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