Women’s “Weakness” an Ideal Market for Psych Drug Profit

     It started when the patent for Prozac, Eli Lilly’s high profit drug, ran out in 2001. Lilly had reaped $22 billion in revenue for the thirteen years it was on the market, and it earned them a full one third of all their income during that time period. When a federal court blocked Lilly’s appeal for a Prozac patent extension, Lilly got tricky.

     Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder had been relegated to an appendix of the 1994 DSM-IV, but it was “revived” to a full blown diagnosis in the DSM-V. That “disorder” made the symptoms of a monthly period that women experience a “mental disorder” for which lucrative medication could be prescribed by a psychiatrist.

     Perfect. Eli had a hot flash of inspiration and they re-branded Prozac as Sarafem so it could now be prescribed for this unfortunate mental “weakness” of women, over which they had no control. Eli Lilly now had another full run of patent protection for Prozac, the drug they re-branded simply by changing the capsule it came in from green and yellow to pink and purple and calling it Sarafem.

     When Sarafem was launched in 2001, Lilly made $80 million dollars from it – less than they’d hoped — and in 2002 they sold the rights to Sarafem (aka Prozac) to Galen Holdings for $295 million.

     Today there are four SSRI’s and other antidepressants that are usually prescribed for PMDD. The market has dwindled considerably for each Big Pharma manufacture, but it is about to be expanded to include far more, younger, premenstrual women.

     It turns out, per psychiatry and Big Pharma, that there can be another premenstrual disorder that women experience before they ever even get to PMDD. It’s perimenopause, a condition that precedes menopause itself – the culprit behind PMDD – and it too, of course, has unpleasant emotional and mental symptoms associated with it which will need to be medicated for women to continue to enjoy life.

     The good news for Big Pharma is that perimenopause begins ten years earlier than menopause itself, which can start as early as forty. Perimenopause, though, can start for a woman as early as thirty. So the market for drugging middle age women for a condition that is only natural to them — not a mental or emotional weakness for their “hysterical” gender — has just been increased by another decade full of pre-premenstrual women.

     There are already tons of SSRI’s and antidepressants available to address plain old PMDD. All Big Parma has to do now is market this new “disorder” correctly to a female market with increasingly more disposable income.

     It’s time now to handle your own, even more prevalent and younger, hot flashes, ladies.