by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
The most important pioneer of psychological society, the driving force behind the Zeitgeist phenomenon of transforming psychological complaints into illnesses in need of therapy, is the pharmaceutical industry.
With annual sales exceeding $ 1 trillion (1), the pharmaceutical industry is gaining earth-shattering power that it seeks to use to its advantage – what else? Only dreamers can seriously believe that this industry is the only one that, for reasons of conscience, is reluctant to submit to the rules of the free market economy because it is fully aware that it has to do with our greatest good: our health. Nor are moral scruples particularly pronounced in the arms industry because their products can kill.
In unleashed capitalism, insofar as it is not kept in check by the state, insatiable greed rules; It allows ethical concerns only to the extent that they contribute to a promotional image without diminishing profits. Is it a coincidence that the age of psychological society began when the first psychotropic drugs hit the market in the 1950s: synthetic tools to influence the mind and soul by changing the brain’s biochemistry? Didn’t chlorpromazine, imipramine, and haloperidol ultimately shape this new era more than Freud, Jung, and Adler?
Initially, their area of application was limited to “mental hospitals.” There they proved themselves splendidly, which is why they gradually supplanted neurosurgical and electric shock torture: Although they did not heal, they reliably calmed down, relieved staff, and on top of that, they appeared gentle.
But the “crazy” target group was much too small for big business in the long run. How could it be expanded? How do the most significant possible sections of the population become customers? And this is what every newly launched product is about: How do you get the maximum number of buyers for it?
The solution is always to persuade people, the fine art of persuasion: “You are missing something that you hadn’t suspected before. You can get it from us.” The new detergent is advertised like this (“So far you have been happy with clean shirts – but they are not clean”). The new dairy food (“You like to eat yogurt – but you have no idea how much better it is for you would taste if you took ours”). The new perfume (“You want to smell good – but only with our fragrance will you bewitch ”) – and also the new drug: “You have a problem. We have the solution: a pill. “
Healthy people do not swallow drugs. So, first of all, the necessary awareness of the problem must be awakened and sharpened. What problem could be more significant than a previously unknown disease? The more undesirable, deviant behaviors and stressful moods are considered pathological – grief as depression, anxiety and fear as anxiety disorder, shock as a post-traumatic stress disorder, exhaustion as CFS, inattention and fidgety as ADHD, a moody imbalance that literally makes you cheer up “Makes for bipolar disorder – the more frequently it can be diagnosed, and the more buyers can be found.
How does a clever seller get the consumer to play along? By raising hopes: emphasizing and overemphasizing advantages; Downplayed disadvantages and withheld.
As long as direct mail is forbidden or severely restricted, and the product is only available on prescription, the group of people who issues the vouchers must be ensnared and won over: the medical profession. How do you win it? Through research results that are hot-melted if necessary and impress them; through guidelines for action in reference works, classification systems, and guidelines to which they are based; through beneficial information from sources that they trust most: the opinion leaders of their guild, their specialist magazines, their specialist societies, their trainers and trainers. The pharmaceutical giants’ marketing budgets are large enough to ensure all of this with staggering cash flows.
Against this background, our healthcare system developed mafia-like structures characterized by extensive corruption. And their development will continue. The next huge leaps in sales, which will drive the share prices of Pfizer, Merck, Lilly & Co. through the roof, promising a further heightening of public risk awareness: “You don’t have a problem yet.
But you could get one soon.” From the manufacturer’s point of view, the optimal sales market is always the largest possible, ideally all of us.
To do this, we must succeed in not just making us fearful of neglect or under-treatment of an already existing “disorder.” No, it is also essential to sensitize us to the omnipresent risk of illness and educate ourselves about its underestimated harbingers and easily overlooked alarm signals.
Big Pharma supertanker
We are concerned about being at risk. Who doesn’t want to avoid getting sick? Isn’t prevention better than cure, as the saying goes? To whom does the prospect of having one’s own child harm themselves or of going mad, not the sweat of fear on their foreheads? Who wouldn’t want to do the right thing as a precaution to avert the worst? And what could be more correct than reaching for the innovative pill that the doctor prescribes, intoning the “effective-safe-and-well-tolerated” mantra?
And this is why the pharmaceutical industry must have an essential say in questions of health prevention and exert the most significant possible influence on the mass media and political decision-makers. She would have reached the goal of her dreams if, in the guise of compassionate care, free screenings of entire population groups, even better of all citizens, took place – along the lines of the “TeenScreen’s” with American schoolchildren, to detect an alleged risk of suicide at an early stage; the routine psychological checks of foster children, military service and large parts of the world of work.
Ideally, new laws ensure that psychotropic drugs can and must be administered across the board for public health benefits. There have been efforts to this end for a long time. At least in the USA, they are increasingly finding advocates among pharmacists and scientists and dismaying approval among politicians.
The market would only be truly saturated if we were all made to use drugs to safeguard and optimize our health, psychological no less than physical, from childhood to the last breath. It is more likely that the inventors of the disease and pill-makers will not give up.
The guild of advisory psychologists and psychotherapists swims in the wake of the supertanker Big Pharma. You do well emulating the mindset and advertising strategies of drug manufacturers. They only give a different, non-pharmaceutical answer to the question of how to deal with “mental illness” in their interest. Otherwise, both here and there, it’s about selling, health, and self-help are detrimental to business. In short, the psychological society is primarily an industrial product. Manufacturers and service providers benefit from their excesses. The seduced patient plays along.
This text comes from the 10-volume series of works by Harald Wiesendanger: Psycholügen, Volume 1: Neue Heimat Psycholand – Where our trust in soul professionals comes from (2017).
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(1) It was 954 billion US dollars in 2015. According to http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/72992/umfrage/umsatz-auf-dem-weltweiten-pharamamarkt-seit-2004