America’s Psychiatric Drug Addition

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 16, 6:24AM EST

“Sell crazy someplace else; we’re all stocked up here,” says Jack Nicholson in 1997’s As Good as It Gets.

There was a point, not so many years ago, when Prozac did not exist, and neither did ADHD. People were depressed or distracted. There was not a lot to be done about it. Those afflicted had to live with their afflictions.

Medco Health Solutions’ (NYSE: MHS) recently released report shows that many people with mental troubles no longer have to suffer, or at least not as much as they used to. In a research report titled “America’s State of Mind,” the experts who did the work say that “more than one-in-five adult Americans took at least one medication commonly used to treat a psychiatric or behavioral disorder in 2010.” The drug companies make billions of dollars on the sales of these medicines. It is hard to say whether the treatments make most people feel better.

Medco makes a great deal of money when it treats the mentally afflicted. So do the large pharmaceutical companies and thousands of American doctors and hospitals. The MHS study’s weakness is that it fails to show whether medicines help, or perhaps to show that people who get the drugs feel better because of the attention they have received.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.