Co-opting psychiatry: The alliance between academic psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry

Abstract The Editorial present the arguments that an alliance between academic psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry is harmful through a critical review of the academic literature and media coverage of activities of the pharmaceutical industry. The industry and the psychiatric profession both gain advantages from promoting biomedical models of psychiatric disturbance and pharmacological treatment. This confluence of interests has lead to the exaggeration of the efficacy of psychiatric drugs and neglect of their adverse effects and has distorted psychiatric knowledge and practice. Academic psychiatry has helped the industry to colonise more and more areas of modern life in order to expand the market for psychotropic drugs. Persuading people to understand their problems as biological deficiencies obscures the social origin and context of distress and prevents people from seeking social or political solutions. Psychiatry has the power to challenge the dominance of the pharmaceutical industry and should put its efforts into developing alternatives to routine drug treatment. Psychiatry needs to disengage from the industry if it wants to make genuine advances in understanding psychiatric disorder and help reverse the harmful social consequences of the widening medicalisation of human experience.