My Perspective

To celebrate their 50 years, BNA has a huge number of reviews covering 'past, present, future' of many topics in neuroscience. Here is the link to a webpage with list of all published reviews. Link:  https://journals.sagepub.com/bna/past-present-future There are three reviews on psychiatric drugs and disorders. I list them below

Johnson & Johnson marketed 'Risperdal' (tradename for Risperidone) using a strategy that downplayed the drug's side-effects, and provided kickback payments to nursing homes, but more importantly encouraged off-label use in children for behavioural disorders/autism and in elderly for dementia/sleeping against the explicit instructions from FDA. Ultimately, the fines for this conduct cost J&J $2.2 billion but they made $18 billion in profits from this drug alone and it enabled the then Risperidal sales manager, Alex Gorsky, to become current CEO of J&J but escaping individual culpability for devising such a strategy! Please watch the above (edited) video that covers Dr. John Rengen Virapen, Ex Director of Eli Lilly, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. This comes after his retirement, after working for 35 Years in that company. He now speaks out on the many crimes Big Pharma was and is responsible for (and he himself also participated ...

I was reading the NICE guidelines on "Consensus statement on high-dose antipsychotic medication", latest (2014) version. In the section on 'Potential gender and ethnicity factors and high-dose strategies' it says: Genetic polymorphisms at both the metabolic level and site of action are likely to contribute to the overall response to a particular drug. Some Asian patients might have a lower dose threshold for a variety of Extrapyramidal side-effects.