"We have become obsessed with psychopharmacology and its endless process of tinkering with medications, adjusting dosages, and piling on more medications to treat the side effects of the drugs we started with," he says. "We have convinced ourselves that we have developed cures for mental illnesses ... when in fact we know so little about the underlying neurobiology of their causes that our treatments are often a series of trials and errors."
Back in December 2003, a study in Psychiatric Services on "financial disincentives" for psychotherapy noted that psychiatrists could earn about $263 an hour doing three 15-minute "medication management" sessions, verses about $156 for a 45 to 50-minute therapy session, representing a pay cut of close to 41% per hour for doing therapy only.
The most common excuse given for the high rate of prescribing psychiatric drugs is that talk, behavioral, cognitive or other forms of non-drug treatment cost too much. However, in 2008, more than $24 billion worth of antidepressants and antipsychotics were dispensed. "Such expenditure would employ 240,000 psychotherapists earning an annual income of $100,000 to provide 6 million hours of psychotherapy averaging 25 client-hours a week," Murray estimates.
These figures do not include what would be possible using the additional revenue generated by the sales of antianxiety, hypnotic, and psychostimulant drugs, he says.
Drug Makers Pay Prescribing Shrinks Top Dollar
Vermont is one of the few states that requires pharmaceutical companies to disclose the money spent on marketing drugs to prescribers each year. In 2009, the report by the state's Attorney General, showed that during the period July 1, 2007, through June 30, 2008, pharmaceutical companies spent approximately $2.9 million, in a state with a population of less than 609,000, on consulting and speaker fees, travel expenses, gifts, and other payments to or for physicians, hospitals, universities and others authorized to prescribe or dispense pharmaceutical products.
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