Enough Is Enough: Big Pharma Must Be Forced Out of Mental Health

ETS Solutions
Dec 14, 2025
4 min read

Enough with the polite language!

The modern mental health system is not failing by accident. It is doing exactly what it was built to do: move massive amounts of psychiatric drugs into human bodies while calling it care.

This isn’t about “a few bad actors." It’s about a business model that requires people to stay sick, dependent, and compliant.

And if that sentence makes anyone uncomfortable—good. It should.

This Is Not a Medical Model. It’s a Sales Model.

Let’s start with the obvious truth everyone tiptoes around:

Psychiatric drugs are among the most profitable products in human history.

Antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants—these are not short-term interventions. They are marketed as lifelong necessities, often prescribed after 15-minute appointments, frequently stacked together, and rarely reassessed in any meaningful way.

The message patients receive is blunt, even when sugarcoated:

Your brain is defective. You will never be okay without this medication. If it doesn’t work, you need more of it—or a different one. If you resist, that’s part of your illness.

That is not empowerment. That is learned helplessness with a prescription label.

The Evidence Is Not as Strong as You’ve Been Told

We are constantly told to “trust the science.”

Fine. Let’s look at it.

Many psychiatric drugs show modest short-term effects over placebo.
Long-term outcome data is often weak, mixed, or quietly ignored.
Withdrawal effects are routinely minimized or mislabeled as “relapse.”
Functional outcomes—work, relationships, quality of life—are rarely the primary measure of success.

Yet these drugs are prescribed to millions, including children, often indefinitely.

If any other branch of medicine operated this way—vague mechanisms, unclear long-term benefits, escalating dosages when outcomes worsen—it would be shut down immediately.

Psychiatry gets a pass because fear and authority silence questions.

Overmedication Has Become a Normalized Harm

Let’s be crystal clear:

Being anxious in a collapsing economy is not a chemical imbalance. Being depressed after trauma is not a brain defect. Being overwhelmed in an isolating, punitive society is not a pathology.

Yet the system responds with:

Polypharmacy instead of understanding
Sedation instead of support
Compliance instead of consent

People are routinely put on:

Multiple psych meds with overlapping side effects
Drugs known to cause metabolic damage, sexual dysfunction, emotional numbing, and cognitive dulling
Regimens that are harder to stop than to start

And when people say, “I feel worse,” they are told:

“That’s your illness talking.”

That’s not treatment. That’s gaslighting with credentials.

Follow the Incentives (Because That Explains the Behavior)

No conspiracy required. Just incentives.

Drugs generate recurring revenue.
Therapy, housing, community, time, and human connection do not.
Pills scale easily. People don’t.
Diagnoses justify billing. Healing complicates it.

So what gets prioritized?

Medication-first approaches
Diagnosis expansion
“Medication adherence” campaigns
Court-mandated treatment
Threats tied to housing, benefits, and freedom

What gets sidelined?

Peer-led support
Non-coercive alternatives
Trauma-informed care
Social and economic solutions
Anything that helps people exit the system instead of orbiting it forever

This Is Coercion Wearing a Lab Coat

Let’s stop pretending choice always exists.

Many people are told—explicitly or implicitly:

Take the meds or lose housing
Take the meds or lose custody
Take the meds or go to jail
Take the meds or be labeled “noncompliant,” “lacking insight,” or “dangerous”

That is not informed consent.

That is chemical compliance enforced by fear.

And once someone is labeled “severely mentally ill,” their credibility evaporates. Their objections don’t count. Their lived experience is dismissed. Their resistance becomes evidence of pathology.

This is how power hides: by redefining disagreement as sickness.

What Actually Helps People Get Better

Here’s the part that really threatens the system:

The strongest predictors of recovery are not medications.

They are:

Stable housing
Income and purpose
Safety from violence
Social connection
Autonomy
Meaning
Being listened to
Being believed

These are boring to pharmaceutical companies because you can’t patent dignity.

So they’re underfunded, framed as “supplements,” or ignored altogether.

What Needs to End — Now

If we are serious about mental health, this must happen:

End pharmaceutical advertising to the public.
Stop presenting psychiatric drugs as default, lifelong solutions.
Mandate honest disclosure about limited benefits and withdrawal risks.
Eliminate forced and court-ordered medication except in true, brief emergencies.
Fund non-drug, voluntary supports at the same scale as medications.
Stop equating recovery with compliance.

This is not radical. What’s radical is how much harm we’ve normalized.

________________________________________________________________________________

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.

Angell, M. (2011). The epidemic of mental illness: Why? The New York Review of Books.https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/06/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/

Cosgrove, L., & Krimsky, S. (2012). A comparison of DSM-IV and DSM-5 panel members’ financial associations with industry: A pernicious problem persists. PLoS Medicine, 9(3), e1001190.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001190

Davies, J., & Read, J. (2019). A systematic review into the incidence, severity and duration of antidepressant withdrawal effects: Are guidelines evidence-based? Addictive Behaviors, 97, 111–121.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2018.08.027

Gøtzsche, P. C. (2015). Deadly medicines and organised crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare. London: Radcliffe Publishing.

Healy, D. (2012). Pharmageddon. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Hengartner, M. P. (2020). Is psychiatry going in the wrong direction? A critique of the current diagnostic paradigm. World Psychiatry, 19(3), 1–2.https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20793

Horwitz, A. V., & Wakefield, J. C. (2007). The loss of sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2005). Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine, 2(8), e124.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Moncrieff, J. (2009). The myth of the chemical cure: A critique of psychiatric drug treatment. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Moncrieff, J., Cooper, R. E., Stockmann, T., Amendola, S., Hengartner, M. P., & Horowitz, M. A. (2022). The serotonin theory of depression: A systematic umbrella review of the evidence.

Molecular Psychiatry, 27, 240–258.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0

Moynihan, R., & Cassels, A. (2005). Selling sickness: How the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies are turning us all into patients. New York: Nation Books.

National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). Mental illness.https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2023). Key substance use and mental health indicators in the United States.https://www.samhsa.gov/data/

Whitaker, R. (2010). Anatomy of an epidemic: Magic bullets, psychiatric drugs, and the astonishing rise of mental illness in America. New York: Crown.

Whitaker, R., & Cosgrove, L. (2015). Psychiatry under the influence: Institutional corruption, social injury, and prescriptions for reform. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.