What are you reading?

[Reader]

Originally Posted by socialjustice_fsu

Would love to hear your thoughts on this book. I read it many years ago. It certainly will raise one's skepticism scale related to use/misuse of ECT, psychotropics in adults and in children.

I think science will eventually show what seems blatantly obvious to me anecdotally: ECT is cruel, inhumane, an abuse of power and barbaric. I haven't read the book however.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a gear in the pharma machine, essentially a white-collar factory worker. Many folks in the drug industry are excellent, well-intentioned, humane people and are dedicated to alleviating suffering in people and animals.

Many are merely profit-driven, un-ethical, un-regulated, un-supervised evil fucks, however. This also applies to those prescribing drugs, especially psychotropic ones or people who are in any position of power such as doctors, psychiatrists or pscyologists. Many of them get into the field to figure out what the hell is wrong with themselves or people in their families of origin. Sometimes, they seem to realize that they can use what they've learned to manipulate people, as well.

It's pretty common knowledge that doctors and medical staff are legally bribed by drug companies to prescribe and push drugs and that pharma has one of the hugest lobby systems around. Hell, they promote drugs on tv as if they were any other desirable consumer product, like shoes or cars or cell phones.

Sure, it is absurdly expensive to develop good drugs. For one drug, for one tiny part, of one arm of one stage of it's development, it could cost the drug company $40,000 per subject. That's even if the subject decides to drop out of the study part way through.

Total up the cost of development, the cost of advertisng and promotion, the cost of lobbying and the cost of paying for legal bribery and you see it is a complex industrial complex. Thus, we have drugs which indeed cost only .005 cents per pill to manufacture costing consumers $8 each.

Imo both drugs and ECT are way over-used and ECT should be banned outright.