“Big Pharma is bankrupting the nation’s health care system by convincing prescribing doctors to over-medicate patients with expensive psychiatric drugs and then send the bills to government programs like Medicaid and Medicare. The peddling of the new generation of psychiatric drugs that include the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors antidepressants (SSRIs), and atypical antipsychotics that began arriving on the market in the late 1980s, has become a cottage industry in the US. Between 1986 and 2004, the sale of antidepressants went from $240 million to $11.2 billion and the sale of antipsychotic drugs rose from $263 million in 1986 to $8.6 billion in 2004.”(08/31/06)