Big Pharma Marketing: Innocently Incompetent or Evil?

     In our August 9, 2025 blog on Lydia Green, Big Pharma marketing writer, we said it was too bad she waited thirty years to expose the dishonesty of the psychiatric drug marketing industry in her recent article in Mad in America. On September 6, 2025 Mad in America published a follow-up piece by her to address the angry comments she received after her first article. She’d been called “greedy and evil” by readers for her dishonest copywriting work promoting dangerous antidepressants like Risperdal.

     In her new article we find that she apparently removed herself from that work after about twenty years. Robert Whitaker offered her the chance to defend herself against the vitriol against her with this follow-up piece.

     She entitles one section of this article “Pharma People Are Nice—So Why Do They Do Harm?” Her answer is their simple “denial” of doing wrong. Green had read one book that suggested that good people can act unethically in corporate, group-think settings, and she heard a Harvard professor speak at a conference and say that “humans have an enormous capacity to rationalize bad behavior.”

     Green concluded that “My clients weren’t bad; they were just unaware. The harm wasn’t caused by personal evil, but by a system that put profit ahead of moral behavior and normalized the compromises needed to keep it going—a system I was still complicit in.”

     Evil is usually defined as immoral behavior that causes unnecessary pain and suffering to others. It more than the innocent “oops” moment that Green seems to have concluded is behind the destruction of human lives after the horrific “side effects” of drugs like Risperdal were intentionally camouflaged by Big Pharma copywriters.

     Johnson & Johnson paid out more than $2.2 billion in 2013 to resolve civil and criminal charges from the U.S. Department of Justice related to its illegal Risperdal marketing. Since then juries have awarded individuals almost $80 million who have suffered crippling conditions from taking Risperdol. Most of the other individual lawsuits with J & J have resulted in undisclosed, out of court settlements.

     Her additional “My clients…were just unaware…and not personally evil” seems a conveniently glib appraisal of the intentions – which some do call evil — behind Big Pharma’s hiding of the truth about these destructive drugs that have, factually, destroyed many people’s lives.

     There are two odd revelations by Green in her more recent piece.

     After she had been working for seven years as a Big Pharma copywriter for antidepressants, her brother, a lawyer, committed suicide by intentionally overdosing on the depressants he’d been taking for years since his two tours in Vietnam. He had been in and out of hospital psychiatric units and, the previous year, had spent more time in them than not. His antidepressants had apparently not helped him, but – as we now know from recent studies – may have actually contributed to his suicide.

     Her father too had been on antidepressants, and yet he too still had attempted suicide, but unsuccessfully. Psychiatrists labeled him “treatment resistant” and had him scheduled for electroshock treatments, but he died from an  undiagnosed cancer condition just days before those were to begin.

     After those two deaths, Green writes, “my doubts continued to grow” about what she was doing. She moved to Montana to work on a political campaign, but four years later she was back at Madison Avenue earning $100,000 a year working on the Risperdal account.

     In 2014 she did change career directions and founded the on-line non-profit RxBalance.org to demonstrate how advertising can promote evidence-based medicine, but also to expose the “hidden sides” of Big Pharma.

     Are those amends still too little, too late?