Drugging Mothers

This is five-part investigative article series by award-winning journalist Evelyn Pringle. Courtesy of NaturalNews

The Mothers Act Disease Mongering Campaign – Part I

The Mothers Act represents the ultimate example of disease mongering at its worst because the eight-year attempt to pass this federal legislation has evolved into profiteering never before exhibited so conspicuously.

Disease mongering “is the selling of sickness that widens the boundaries of illness and grows the markets for those who sell and deliver treatments,” according to Ray Moyniahan and David Henry in the April 11, 2006 paper in PLoS Med, titled, “The Fight against Disease Mongering.”
Read entire Part I here.

The Mothers Act Disease Mongering Campaign – Part II

The Mothers Act legislation specifically defines the term “postpartum conditions” as “postpartum depression” or “postpartum psychosis.” Use of the Act as an 8-year disease mongering campaign to further promote the new cottage industry of “reproductive psychiatry,” or “reproductive mental health,” comes from websites often run by people who will financially benefit from passage of the Act.

In 1992, the late journalist Lynn Payer wrote a book titled, “Disease Mongering,” and defined disease mongering as, “trying to convince essentially well people that they are sick, or slightly sick people that they are very ill.”   Read entire Part II here.

The Mothers Act Disease Mongering Campaign – Part III

In an article titled, “Disorders Made To Order,” in the July 2002 issue of Mother Jones Magazine, Brendan Koerner described the “modus operandi” of marketing a disease rather than selling a drug, “typical of the post-Prozac era.”

“The strategy [companies] use-it’s almost mechanized by now,” said the late Dr Loren Mosher, a San Diego psychiatrist and former official at the National Institute of Mental Health, in the article. Read entire Part III here.

The Mothers Act Disease Mongering Campaign – Part IV

The Mothers Act campaign has evolved into the most rabid gang of disease mongers seen in recent years, likely due to its 8-year existence.

In the 2002 paper titled, “Selling sickness: the pharmaceutical industry and disease mongering,” in the British Medical Journal, Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath, and David Henry, describe the mechanisms of the Mothers Act disease mongering campaign to a tee when explaining that:
“Within many disease categories informal alliances have emerged, comprising drug company staff, doctors, and consumer groups. Ostensibly engaged in raising public awareness about underdiagnosed and undertreated problems, these alliances tend to promote a view of their particular condition as widespread, serious, and treatable.” Read entire Part IV here.

The Mothers Act Disease Mongering Campaign – Part V

In the title of a paper in the May, 2009, Journal of Affective Disorders, Stephen Matthey, of the University of Sydney Infant, Child & Adolescent Mental Health Service Research Unit in Australia, asks, “Are we overpathologising motherhood?”

The paper was critical of self-report screening measures such as the Edinburgh Depression Scale for overestimating the rate of psychiatric disorders in motherhood. “The properties of the Edinburgh Scale show that around 50% of women scoring high are not in fact depressed,” the paper’s abstract reports. Read entire Part V here.