The American Psychiatric Association’s release of the proposed fifth revision of its billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) fuels University of California’s Dr. Irwin Savodnik’s statement, “The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry.”
The American Psychiatric Association yesterday gave the press an advance view of its proposed Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the reports were highly skeptical. Will Tiger Woods soon be diagnosed with “hypersexual disorder”? He could be if the proposals go into effect. The APA will be accepting comments through April. The news reports barely noted the fact that dozens of psychiatrists who serve on the DSM-V (it’s the fifth edition) task force and working groups have financial ties to the pharmaceutical and medical device industries.
Three quarters of nurses have seen people with dementia in general wards in hospital prescribed antipsychotic drugs that are known to double the risk of death and triple the risk of a stroke in these patients, research has shown.
With drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) now stating it will abandon future antidepressant research, one can only wonder if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration noted GSK’s CEO Andrew Witty’s admission that it is “hard to prove that a depression drug is working” because “patient improvement is measured by subjective mood surveys, and not by the clear-cut blood tests and biological measures used in other diseases.”
GlaxoSmithKline PLC said it will stop research into new antidepressants and focus on diseases for which it believes it can develop more valuable drugs, a major shift for a company that developed some of the biggest-selling antidepressants of the past 20 years.
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