After the high-profile pharmaceutical takeover of a lifesaving drug to prevent parasitic infection in children and AIDS patients by Martin Shkreli, when his firm Turing Pharmaceuticals overhauled the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill was magnified by his subsequent social-media blunder, national dialogue is shifting toward underlining the embedded ties between money and the drug industry. Unfortunately, and somewhat unsurprisingly, price gouging in the American pharmaceutical complex, from physical to psychological treatment, is common practice.
However, the collusion of the dollar bill bleeds further into face-to-face psychiatric care. According to Daily Iowan reportage last week, the UI now ranks last in student-assistance services in the Big Ten, with a counselor-to-student ratio of 1 for every 2,700 — nearly 1,200 higher than the UI’s accreditation standards. A portion of the blame is placed on funding, following the expiration of the university’s three-year $270,000 suicide awareness and counseling grant.
With the loss of the Garrett Lee Smith Grant, the University Counseling Service Director Barry Schreier forecast to the DI a drop in counseling programs alongside a lack of ability to hire more counselors. This will surely fail to accommodate the spiked influx of students admitted to the UI, particularly if the increased trajectory continues, as the student waitlist for counselor contact has already reached over a week.
Chiefly, if lack of funding is the issue illuminated by officials, then the UI administration needs to secure or create the means to properly finance assistance for students’ psychological health (we have hired a former CEO to tackle the task of presidency at this institution anyway). That the university relies so heavily on outside and federal funding for counseling services reveals internal shortcomings in regards to student wellness, in addition to Student Health and Wellness operating independently from the prestigious, deep-pocketed UI Hospitals and Clinics.
Second, a radical redistribution of cash flow needs to occur in this country’s model for psychiatry and pharmaceuticals. Corporate dollars may be required in order to facilitate future research, however, money intermingles further in the model.
According to analysis conducted by Robert Kneller, professor at the University of Tokyo, and released by Nature between 1998 and 2007, approximately half of U.S.-approved scientifically advancing drugs resulted from research from universities and biotech firms — not drug companies. UI Colleges of Medicine and Public Health rank 11th and 5th among public medical schools in National Institutes of Health grants and grant dollars per research, according to the Department of Internal Medicine, whose department holds a budget around $45 million. As a result, the money funds physical and biological research to “health services research.”
The source of money in the testing and research phases is not as entangled within the psychiatric and pharmaceutical complex, though. According to a 2012 British Medical Journal article by Professors Donald Light and Joel Lexchin, pharmaceutical companies, who were portrayed in the midst of innovation crises by the Wall Street Journal in 2002, spent 19 times more on marketing than research. Multinational drug giant GlaxoSmithKline posted $41.4 in total revenue in 2014, according to GlobalData, witnessing a 21 percent profit margin. In 2013 that firm was fined a mere $3 billion for promoting the depression drug Paxil to children, according to ProPublica.
Personhood has been taken out of the equation within the nebulous pharmaceutical industrial complex, making way for marketing and rhetoric — exacerbated by discrete funding for counseling services. With the corporatization of psychological health services, those in need have become dehumanized into statistics by way of the dollar bills.
