Suicidal Empathy and Big Pharma Funding

     With the 1987 FDA approval of Prozac, Big Pharma launched a relentless marketing campaign for their breakthrough miracle SSRI that would solve anyone’s emotional distress. TV ads, magazine ads, doctor’s office white papers, and seminars all over the place were used to promote the wonders of Prozac and other new psychiatric drugs. Prozac was everywhere, even on the cover of Time magazine.

     Now Big Pharma just needed more customers so they could really make some money off this thing.

     A much more covert marketing campaign was put into place to convince Americans just how many of us were mentally ill. Questionnaires were suddenly being filled out at every general practitioner’s office visit and at every pediatrician’s office around the country. Articles then began appearing by prominent academics touting the epidemic of mental illness in the country.

     Politicians were soon persuaded – by healthy campaign donations: Biden alone received $9 million from Big Pharma – to introduce legislation that would fund treatment for all these poor souls who suddenly had been discovered and who now needed mental help.

     Remember: community surveys done in the 1930s and 1940s showed that less than one in a thousand Americans experienced any depression, per Charlotte Silverman’s 1968 book, The Epidemiology of Depression. And that was during the time of two world wars and one Great Depression.

     Today Big Pharma’s underground marketing team is putting out into the public and government eye the fact that there are now too few psychiatric beds in America which can be used to house this growing population of mentally ill. It would be cruel – no…it is now already cruel – not to be doing something to help these poor souls.

     So, there is now a bill before the U.S. Congress that would eliminate the exclusion of psychiatric hospitals from receiving Medicaid payments and increase the age range of patients there eligible for them. The Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (predominantly funded by big Pharma) are lobbying heavily for its passage.

     It turns out, however, that only the number of government-owned psychiatric beds has declined — from 64 percent to 48 percent — from 2011 to 2023. The number of independent psychiatric facility beds, owned by for-profit chains, has grown 27 percent in that same time period.

     Those are the beds that the removal of the Medicaid payment exclusion bill would now let the government to fund.

     Surprise, surprise.

     Gad Saad’s “suicidal empathy” has a new application here. By convincing politicians to increase funding for the “mentally ill,” a whole new population of the innocent and vulnerable can be made a highly profitable market for Big Pharma and for private psychiatric facilities.

     This suicidal empathy will have the exact opposite effect empathy is supposed to have. Another population will be added to those 43,000,000 millions now taking antidepressants even though they don’t really need them, but who cannot easily wean themselves from.