Sticky Business

The July 4 issue of Psychiatric News featured several highly salubrious signs of critical thinking, but one tiny indication that the sickness within APA lingers.

The healthy signs were articles that reported on unbiased studies presented at APA’s 2003 annual meeting that compared conventional antipsychotics with the costly, much-hyped atypicals. It is a sign of hope that these presentations were sponsored and published by APA, not by the pharmaceutical industry.

In that same issue, however, the ominous symptom of lingering illness was the bulky inserts advertising those same high-priced antipsychotics. Most ominously, the rubbery, gelatinous glue affixing them to adjacent pages was more tenacious and adhesive than before. It used to crumble off easily, like a week-old scab. Now it infiltrates and binds to the page, like a penetrating sore. Does this hint at APA’s underlying fatal acquired immune deficiency to drug company cash?