Frederick Goodwin: What the NY Times Left Out

"Check out your waiting room. See the one who looks like Heidi Klum? That's the pharm rep. So who would you rather be talking to, Heidi Klum or a patient? Me, too, and therein lies the problem.

"Take another look in your waiting room. See the Russell Crowe look-alike? Say no more. You may think that you are above Heidi and Russell's blandishments. The drug companies have billions of dollars invested in the proposition that you are not."

Then to drug companies:

"I'm strongly getting the impression you guys are like the auto industry. Same old engines, new fins. In case you haven't noticed, Detroit probably won’t be around ten years from now. [Boy, was I prescient on that point!] You are the only industry that doesn’t talk to its customers, the end users of your products, and it shows."

When I incorporated these remarks and other critical commentary into a ground rounds lecture I gave this year at Princeton House, a psychiatric facility in Princeton, NJ, no sooner had I stopped talking than the room cleared faster than if someone had yelled, "Fire!" No one hung around to talk to me. Only one person bought my book.

We have a long way to go.

Meds and psychiatry have been essential in helping me win back my life. Psychiatric wisdom has provided me great insight into my illness. It makes sense that there should be collaboration between the drug industry and psychiatry. But for years, the drug industry has been calling the tune and psychiatry has been stupid to what is going on, much to our detriment.

No doubt, many more prominent psychiatrists will find their way onto the front page of the NY Times, for all the wrong reasons. With such huge sums of money involved, the public has every right to question the credibility of leading academic researchers, as well as their research. Certainly, a major overhaul of the drug industry and psychiatry is long overdue.

But I need to finish with this reminder: Dr Goodwin is one of the enlightened ones. Educating his fellow psychiatrists has been a major mission in his life. In this regard, it is worth quoting a portion of my interview with him (one that did not make it into any of the videos):

John McManamy: [In relation to doctors needing to be cautious about prescribing antidepressants.] "Do you honestly believe psychiatrists on the coal face understand this? ... "

Dr Goodwin: " ... In the last few years, I've done roughly a hundred lectures a year to psychiatrists, emphasizing that point. And I think I've probably been in direct interaction with about 20,000 psychiatrists in the United States ... "

Ironically, GSK, makers of two different antidepressants, underwrote most of the cost of Dr Goodwin warning doctors against indiscriminately prescribing antidepressants. Tellingly, the NY Times failed to disclose this fact.

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Check out Dr Goodwin for yourself in my exclusive interview, here at BipolarConnect.