Bay State Governor Uses Clancy Trial to Expand Big Pharma’s Net

     In the aftermath of the Lindsay Clancy trial, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey announced Tuesday her proposal to provide free home visits by nurses to all parents with newborns and to update the state’s regulations for mental health screening of these new mothers.

     “To every mom who has struggled with her mental health before, during or after pregnancy, I want you to know we see you — I see you,” she said. Healey asked state lawmakers to approve $2 million for a program of home nursing visits to all families of newborns. The nurses would monitor the mothers’ postpartum health and would screen them for depression and other mental health concerns.

     Like many Americans, Governor Healy has not been able to distinguish Clancy’s defense argument that it was the cascade of psychiatric medications that pushed Lindsay over the edge, not post-partum psychosis, per se. Although her lawyer’s request to educate the jury about “involuntary intoxication” by her psychiatric medication was denied by the judge, his closing arguments made clear the devastating effect on Lindsay’s mental health made by her medications. The jury – 75 percent women — believed him.

     That lack of distinction by Healy plays right into the hands of a greedy pharmaceutical industry looking for more than the already 80,000,000 American “customers” now on antidepressants. Healy’s program would send an new army of nurses out into the public to deliver mental illness screenings on otherwise unsuspecting mothers of newborns.

     These short, utterly unscientific questionnaires – composed by a paid psychiatrist, in fact — are what have been such successful tools for Big Pharma to increase exponentially the number of Americans – and especially women and children – on antidepressants. Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Lexapro, and Prozac have been financial bonanzas for Big Pharma pharmaceutical companies. Average annual revenue for antidepressants is around $7.5 billion in America.

     Their compound annual growth rate of 3.5 percent is due in part to the proliferation of these omnipresent psychiatric screening questionnaires.

     Governor Healy’s intent may be to better help new mothers through this $2 million dollar program, but in fact she will end up increasing the number of mothers on antidepressants. They too will then be in the same danger that Lindsay Clancy was of being made crazy by them.

     One out of every three women in Massachusetts already now takes antidepressants. Isn’t that enough?