When we talk of someone being biased perhaps the assumption is that they are deliberately so and that even at times wilful with regard to recommending a product or service that they feel to be lacking. Bias produced from psychiatry’s links to the pharmaceutical industry is not necessarily something that is done consciously or with any wilful intent to harm or deceive.

Mental illness/distress is widely seen as something that is medical in nature and often it is presented as being disease based and as such it seems rational to use medical approaches. Psychiatric drugs, the development of pharmaceutical makers, have been presented as specific treatments for conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. This is quite a new concept. Whilst drugs have been used for many years the way they are now used and presented is directly related to marketing by pharmaceutical makers. It took some effort to establish chlorpromazine as anything more than a drug that sedated/calmed, (initially being likened to producing a lobotomy by chemical means) after time chlorpromazine became more than this and was seen as a specific treatment, tackling the underlying cause of psychosis.

Drugs/medications are not always bad and of course many find them really helpful. I feel that psychiatry has however lost sight of the human element with its links to Pharma and now emotions and suffering are reduced to chemical imbalances and genetically different brains that require management. This seems to have happened in part due to how the pharmaceutical industry has educated psychiatry.

Non-drug and minimum-drug approaches to mental illness/distress are difficult to promote, even if benefits can be clearly shown, such as in the case of the Soteria project. Soteria was seen perhaps as anti-psychiatry and anti-medication, even though medications, including neuroleptics, were used but in lower doses and with a different rationale. The biggest difference was that schizophrenia was not seen specifically in terms of a disease and therefore drugs/medications were not seen as something always essential to treat the underlying illness. Non-drug approaches to schizophrenia can be taken today but not without neuroleptics being the cornerstone of treatment.

Psychiatry has become too medical and less human, it is fixed in terms of how it sees mental distress/illness and this is the result of its connection with Pharma, it has been reduced. Sure there are benefits from the pharmaceutical industry, and sure some people do require drugs/medications and would be worse off without them. But let’s not forget that not everyone requires the same approach and surely we owe it to consumers of psychiatric drugs/medications to be honest about negatives as well as positives. The only way to fix things is by some sort of independence.