This talk examines how psychoactive drugs, manufactured by pharmaceutical laboratories, have turned both clinicians and patients into subjects in a human laboratory. As a result, the experiences of those seeking treatment for nervous disorders – as well as the self-understanding of the rest of us – have been transformed through a marketing of diseases that utilizes ghost-written articles, selectively publishes data, and creates patient groups and disease-awareness campaigns.

David Healy studied medicine in Dublin and Cambridge. He is a Professor of Psychiatry in Cardiff University, a former Secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology, and author of over 140 peer reviewed articles, 200 other pieces, and 15 books, including The Antidepressant Era, The Creation of Psycho-pharmacology, The Psychopharmacologists, (three volumes), Let Them Eat Prozac, and Mania (forthcoming). He has been involved as an expert witness in homicide and suicide trials involving SSRI drugs, and in bringing these problems to the attention of American and British regulators. He has also worked on aspects of how pharmaceutical companies market drugs by marketing diseases and co-opt academic opinion-leaders by ghostwriting their articles.