Marketing to the Masses—Never saw it coming

If you know what to look for, you will find hidden drug marketing campaigns practically everywhere.

Many of these campaigns come from industry‑funded front groups operated by psychiatrists but posing as compassionate patient support groups.

Of all these programs, one of the most successful is the benevolent‑sounding mental health screening campaign; it uses broad‑based psychiatric screening questionnaires to diagnose common life situations such as sadness, nervousness and occasional loneliness.

Under the guise of “suicide prevention,” programs such as TeenScreen target teenagers. But statistics show that there is no teenage suicide epidemic. Instead, in the last decade, teenage suicide has actually gone down by 25%.

More to the point, participants are more likely to consider suicide a solution to a problem after the screening program than before the program.

So far, screening campaigns have been limited to those willing to participate.

But what if the screenings are no longer voluntary?