Drug goes from $50/vial to $28,000/vial. Best Healthcare in the world, Baby!

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36. Antidepressants to treat grief? Psychiatry panelists with ties to drug industry say yes

What Americans on drugs (and their industry-funded drug cartel suppliers, both legal and illegal) are ignoring is the fact that a report was once issued by prominent psychologists that a majority of people in the world who are "clinically depressed" have reason to be depressed. Because their lives and/or their communities suck. (That wasn't the clinical terms used)

[font size="3"]Antidepressants to treat grief? Psychiatry panelists with ties to drug industry say yes[/font]

It was a simple experiment in healing the bereaved: Twenty-two patients who had recently lost a spouse were given a widely used antidepressant. The drug, marketed as Wellbutrin, improved “major depressive symptoms occurring shortly after the loss of a loved one,” the report in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry concluded.

When should the bereaved be medicated? For years, the official handbook of psychiatry, issued by the American Psychiatric Association, advised against diagnosing major depression when the distress is “better accounted for by bereavement.” Such grief, experts said, was better left to nature. But that may be changing.

In what some prominent critics have called a bonanza for the drug companies, the American Psychiatric Association this month voted to drop the old warning against diagnosing depression in the bereaved, opening the way for more of them to be diagnosed with major depression — and thus, treated with antidepressants.

The association itself depends in part on industry funding, and the majority of experts on the committee that drafted the new diagnostic guideline have either received research grants from the drug companies, held stock in them, or served them as speakers or consultants.

Drug companies have shown an interest in treating patients who have recently lost a loved one, having sponsored and published the results of at least three trials in which the bereaved were treated with antidepressants, including the Wellbutrin study.