Today’s Entry from the Synchronicity Dept.

By Amanda Painter

Today I bounced from an interview on Democracy Now! with British novelist David Cornwell (who writes under the pen name John le Carré) to CNN.com to see what the news was offering. Perhaps it’s little surprise that Big Pharma and the creation and branding of diseases (and their profitable medications) received mention in both.

In The Constant Gardener, in particular, it was quite extraordinary to go to Basel, to get among the young pharmaceutical executives in a private way, promise them that I would never tell—divulge their names, and listen to them pouring out their rage against the work they were doing, at the people who were making them do it. But they were still taking the penny, and they were still doing what they were doing. They were still contributing to the invention of diseases. They were fiddling with compounds, turn them into new patents, when they actually had no greater effect than the previous patent. They were joining the lie that every new compound put on the market cost six or eight hundred million dollars, which is pretty good nonsense when you think that many of the main health life-saving drugs that go on the market have been developed, for instance, in your own federal laboratories and then sold by some strange method to the pharmaceutical company, so they didn’t do the hard work themselves very often.

I was particularly struck by Cornwell’s mention of the rage of those he interviewed, and his later mention of what ‘corporate power’ means to him in the context of globalization in general, not just in the pharmaceutical industry: “So, ask me what corporate power means to me, it means the ability of the individual to sacrifice his own instincts, his own decent instincts, in the name of the corporation, that people will do things to—on behalf of the corporation, to a group of people, which they would never do to their next-door neighbor, so that all the decent humanity seems to be set aside the moment they walk through the corporate doors.”

I would be curious to know how much of that rage is shared by American counterparts in the pharmaceutical industry? Or have most Americans been sufficiently anesthetized not to even notice that they have decent instincts, let alone feel angry about going against them? After all, as Dr. Carl Elliott pointed out in this article on CNN.com, we are home to extensive PR efforts in addition to much of the research.

He notes that a 1928 PR book called Propaganda outlines a method for selling pianos that makes an end-run around the potential customer by using reporters to create an environment in which a person will come to think of buying a piano as if it was his own idea. This is the exact technique pharmaceutical companies have used, hiring PR firms to launch award-winning campaigns — as with Paxil for shyness (which falls in to the category of “under-diagnosed” conditions which, along with the “shameful condition that can be destigmatized,” are the two easiest types of conditions to “rebrand”).

Elliott writes:

In order to convince shy people they had social anxiety disorder, GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Paxil, hired a PR firm called Cohn and Wolfe. Cohn and Wolfe put together a public awareness campaign called “Imagine being allergic to people,” which was allegedly sponsored by a group called the “Social Anxiety Disorders Coalition.”

GlaxoSmithKline also recruited celebrities like Ricky Williams, the NFL running back, and paid them to give interviews to the press about their own social anxiety disorder. Finally, they hired academic psychiatrists working on social anxiety disorder and sent them out on the lecture circuit in the top 25 media markets.

The results were remarkable. In the two years before Paxil was approved for social anxiety, there were only about 50 references to social anxiety disorder in the press. But in 1999, during the PR campaign, there were over a billion references.

Within two years Paxil had become the seventh most profitable drug in America, and Cohn and Wolfe had picked up an award for the best PR campaign of 1999. Today, social anxiety disorder, far from being rare, is often described as the third most common mental illness in the world.

Social anxiety is the third most common mental illness in the world? Are we sure it’s not self-hatred? Oh no — we’re all just doing what we can to get by and feed our families and have a little fun now and then. What could we possibly hate ourselves for? I think, perhaps, once that ‘decent instinct’ has been overridden a few times and the self-loathing pushed down enough, we may just lose that capacity for rage. I certainly did not see anything like it in Orgasm, Inc, a documentary about the creation of ‘female sexual dysfunction’ in order to sell a ‘female Viagra’. Sure, there were a couple of female employees who clearly were uncomfortable with the bogus science they were helping to disseminate. But that discomfort came in the shape of embarrassment and glossed-over shame. And from what I can tell, once shame gets covered over it grows in toxicity.

What’s the best way to circumvent the survive/ignore instincts/stagnant rage/shame/medicated numbness cycle for anyone already caught in it? Ideas, anyone?