During the 70s, psychiatric drugs became much less risky and were beginning to be offered to the wider temporarily distressed public
Before the 70s, psychiatric drugs were very risky and were only given to the sickest of patients. The next new wave of “wonder” drugs came during the 1970s. The benzodiazepines, Librium and Valium, changed everything and set a new tone—from now on Pharma’s emphasis would be on developing and marketing medications that produced less intrusive side effects and were less likely to cause death from overdose. Pharma companies exploit the fuzziness between mild mental disorder and being probably well to extend diagnosis and sell more drugs, and this allowed the focus of care to shift away from the very small cohort of really sick patients to the wider world of the worried well. Before long a large percentage of the U.S. population was taking easy-to-take psychiatric medicine. And because treating patients with “benzos” required no great expertise, primary care physicians took over most of the prescribing.
These drugs soon were so wildly successful they became part of the American way of life, and the drug companies realized that psychiatric medicines would become their gold mine. Of course, it turned out that Librium and Valium (and even more, their dreadful younger sib Xanax, introduced in the 1980s) were really quite addicting and not so benign in overdose, particularly when mixed with alcohol or other drugs that depress respiration. They were a great boon to the drug companies, but not to the patients.
References
- Frances, Allen. (2013). Saving Normal CHAPTER 3. Diagnostic Inflation (p. 126). New York, NY: HarperCollins.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Psychiatry / History Status:☀️