Abstract
The chapter focuses on the global spread of psychopharmaceuticals, discussing how in 1990s psychopharmaceuticals were cast as heralding a new era of treating mental ills. Yet this hope, or hype, started to wane in the 2000s, and even large pharmaceutical companies are now withdrawing from this segment. Doubt about psychopharmaceuticals has even gained ground in the more recent policies of the World Health Organisation, which has moved from advocating drugs as the best first-line treatment to a greater emphasis on non-pharmacological therapies.The “public lives” of drugs that are captured by WHO treatment gap calculations are shown to be cut off from the “private lives” of psychopharmaceuticals in the prescriptions of nonspecialists in the private market. Drugs are circulating far more widely than is known, and the influence of manufacturers onto prescription patterns is far stronger than is assumed
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | The Sedated Society |
| Subtitle of host publication | The Causes and Harms of our Psychiatric Drug Epidemic |
| Editors | James Davies |
| Publisher | Springer |
| Pages | 249-269 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Edition | 1 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-3-319-44911-1 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-3-319-44910-4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2 Feb 2017 |