Canadian Mindscape Monitor

Various and sundry Canadian media covered with relatively little fanfare or controversy the recent decision of sitting “independent” Senator Lillian Dyck to become a Liberal.  Along the way, they casually described her background, which includes a PhD in Biological Psychiatry and studies into antidepressants and antipsychotics. She’s also patented some mental health drugs herself.  So [...]

Sorry, dearest readers, that we’ve been delinquent here at CMM lately getting posts up… We’re trying to get back on the job after binge-working on the aforementioned feature article about the rights of seniors in BC care homes. But we couldn’t let you miss today’s New York Times coverage of the latest on the lawsuit [...]

The Canadian Press is reporting that the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada is “endorsing the principles” of a April 2008 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges which recommended cutting off the stream of kickbacks and perks like free pizza parties, refrigerators and sunbelt trips being given to med students by pharmaceutical [...]

Canada’s Mental Health Commission has spun off a fundraising arm, “Mental Health Partnerships of Canada”. The MHC announced recently that it had developed a “strategic alliance” between Mental Health Partnerships of Canada and the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation to raise money “to support the goals of the Mental Health Commission of Canada”. However, Mental Health [...]

Why is the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation hiding its biggest corporate funder? If you look at the “Partners and Corporate Contributors” section of their website, you see a fairly innocuous-looking list of corporate contributors:
The Frank Cowan Foundation
CIBC
CIBC World Markets Children’s Foundation
RBC Financial Group
Scotiabank
TD Bank Financial Group
That’s the whole list. But delve [...]

U.S. National Public Radio has finally fired its psychiatrist talkshow host, Dr.  Frederick Goodwin of “The Infinite Mind”. The New York Times reports he potted $1.3 million in kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies — much more than NPR ever paid him to host the show no doubt — during his 7-year tenure. “The fact that he [...]

An article in Ontario’s Mississauga News reports on a nurse winning a $5,000 award from pharmaceutical giant Bayer’s “Bayer Dream Fund“, given “to support the dream of a Canadian who is effectively managing their diabetes”. That nurse’s dream? She is “creating a local exercise program for people with diabetes who also experience mental illness”.
It’s a [...]

A new short video on YouTube discusses the dangers of a lawsuit that’s been launched by CanWest Global, Canada’s biggest media empire, to strike down Canada’s laws against prescription drug advertising. Written and produced by Rob Wipond, sometimes rumoured to be the main person behind our very own Canadian Mindscape Monitor, the lawsuit is a [...]

A Canadian Newswire article based on an aggressive press release and analytical report from the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association, in turn based mainly on several recent Annual Reports from the Canadian government’s Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB) is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it attacks numerous common myths. Evidently, for example, protecting [...]

In a saga which began almost two years ago, the New York Times reports a U.S. judge has finally ordered the public release of a slew of Eli Lilly’s internal documents about its big-selling “antipsychotic” sedating drug Zyprexa. The confidential documents became infamous when maverick Alaska civil rights lawyer Jim Gottstein of the Law Project [...]

“The Pill Pushers” a terrific article by Alex Roslin has appeared this week in Vancouver, BC’s Georgia Straight newsweekly. The centre-piece is an interview with a former Eli Lilly sales rep, who describes how he was trained to pitch doctors to prescribe certain drugs, downplay deadly side effects and inappropriate uses, and slowly condition doctors [...]