OpEdNews.com ran an article by Martha Rosenberg about the “national pathology of creating and treating diseases that aren't even there.” The article, “The Many Faces of Big Pharma's Disease Mongering” says that ad agencies are partly to blame for this phenomenon, in addition to doctors and drug companies. For example, “Slick PR firm, Cohn and Wolfe, is credited with vaulting "shyness" to a national psychiatric problem the answer for which is Paxil and creating faux grassroots patient groups like Freedom From Fear to push their clients' drugs. And Wyeth's ad agency serenaded the nation with the message in its The Change You Deserve campaign that if we were not enjoying things the way we used to do, if we were lacking in what agencies used to call get-up-and-go, it was time to go on the antidepressant Effexor.” Rosenberg concludes, “As long as people derive more of a thrill out of dosing and experimenting on themselves —in spite of the dangerous side effects and sometimes because of them—than having a life in which they define the problems and answers, Big Pharma has its living room lab animals.”
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