The New Yorker has provided a pretty succinct history of psychiatry, but it does leave off on some key points that the reader may need to make note of. It is important to keep track of real world contexts to glean more about the history of pharmacueticals and their development within the practice of psychiatry because it appears as though pharmaceuticals could not have gotten off the ground without unusual practices and unusual clinical trials tied to hospitals, asylums, jails and black sites of non disclosure and very limited habeas corpus rights if any at all. The trial runs and development of pharmacological research seem like they should have been very cost prohibitive if they were not subsidized in very unusual ways by wealthy patrons (like states or otherwise) who could overcome the hurdles of limited growth and limited feasibility in the early stages, because the prevalence of pharmacological drugs in the public is kind of hard to explain without unusual efforts to market the materials and put them out into the public.

We might look at this in terms of pharmacies and how they impacted the local medical practices as pharmacies were bought out by large investment firms and local workers began to lose more and more of their specialized knowledge to the patent and license carriers that never allowed any of the workers to practice their original crafts of herbology and medical review which were so prized by their local communities and the local practicing doctors or medical workers. Patients no longer had the right to request medicine without special referrals and all of that inter communication and local knowledge, along with all of the very practical social know how that would come along with it, was destroyed by large investment firms that really have a hard time explaining their wealth unless they were tied to huge government subsidies which are the only things liable to help explain how the transformation took place.

Take a brief look at an excerpt from another article about the history of pharmaceutical advertising and ask yourself:

Who is the audience for drug company commercials?

From the article:

GONZALEZ: It wasn't too long ago that TV in the U.S. was like the rest of the world, completely free of prescription drug ads. The '60s, the '70s, most of the '80s, there are no ads like this.

LOU MORRIS: There was no advertising to the public, I mean, not for prescription drugs.

CHILDS: Lou Morris worked on drug advertising for two decades at the Bureau of Drugs at the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration.

GONZALEZ: And drugs have always been heavily advertised, but back then, this is how drug companies got the word out about new prescription drugs. Salesmen would knock on a doctor's door like, have you heard of Motrin? - this is back when Motrin was prescription only - please allow me to tell you about it. Drug companies could also put ads in medical journals, so if you looked at a medical journal, you'd see a regular-looking ad for, like, Motrin. Maybe the ad's in color. But behind the ad was pages and pages of science and risks and disclaimers about the drug.

MORRIS: The mechanism of action, the indications, the side effects, the warnings, the precautions, you know, the toxicology.

CHILDS: Lou says this disclaimer was euphemistically called a drug's brief summary. It was mandatory, required by the FDA, so the doctors would understand all the science behind a drug before prescribing it to anyone.

Adverse side effects that manifest within the body, as well as ecological risk factors that exist outside of the body, are not often subjects that many of us feel comfortable discussing openly. However, it is essential that rational consumers are well-informed about these issues, with full disclosure rights that extend beyond the confines of any medical prerogatives. Transparency in these matters is crucial for fostering a responsible consumer culture that prioritizes both personal health and environmental well-being.

This is likely to be the last thing that many patients consider, but it does need to be known that it is not often clear how medicine is able to traverse through the body or the body-brain barrier when introduced through the stomach, and it is not often clear how we learn about the impacts of the drugs we use without extensive clinical effort — and it is not always clear how well any of this information is being recorded when the impacts of expelled waste medicine from the body has impacts well beyond the body in our waterways and soils.

Review the article entry:

It's a well-documented fact that adverse prescription drug effects and other medical errors are the third leading cause of death in America. Adverse drug events harm 2.7 million hospitalized patients in the U.S. annually, with over 106,000 deaths and that's just for hospitalized patients. Another 350,00 adverse drug events occur in U.S. nursing homes each year.

And believe it or not, by most estimates, only 1-10% of adverse events are ever reported.

Are there no effective safeguards in place to protect consumers from dangerous drugs? And who might be to blame?