How About Paying Poor People to Take Psychiatric Drugs?

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Healthy Debate discusses some experiments with doctors paying their patients to engage in healthier behaviors, and asks where the risks in such practices might lie.

“The most vociferous debate centres around paying people to take medication, especially drugs used to treat mental health disorders,” reports Healthy Debate. “Some worry patients will continue to take drugs, even if they find they have harmful side effects, because they are getting paid to do so. Joanna Pawelkiewicz, who advocates for safe and affordable housing for people with mental health needs, argues ‘it should be up to each person to decide what [interventions] work for them’ and that health advocates should work on removing the barriers to those identified interventions. ‘One of the most effective interventions for my own mental health has been exercise but what if I can’t afford a gym membership?’ she asks.”

Can financial incentives help patients be healthier? (Healthy Debate, March 12, 2015)

4 COMMENTS

  1. The doctors are forcing and coercing people to take the psychiatric drugs currently. Why in the world would they start paying people to take them, when they are legally allowed to force these toxic drugs onto people? That makes no sense to me.

    But then, again, neither does forcing people to take drugs known to cause psychosis:

    “neuroleptics … may result in … the anticholinergic intoxication syndrome … Central symptoms may include memory loss, disorientation, incoherence, hallucinations, psychosis, delirium, hyperactivity, twitching or jerking movements, stereotypy, and seizures.”

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  2. Sorry for being suspicious of the scheme, but perhaps it was Big Pharma’s idea, and they would take a little cut in profit to promote it?

    After all, they were the people who didn’t want Zyprexa to have a warning label (as it did in Japan) in 2002 – warning of weight gain, diabetes, and hyperglycemia – because, after all, in the words of Eli Lilly’s public relations person – Marni Lemmons, such a thing might cause people “not to take their medicine”….thereby costing Lilly a pretty penny.

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  4. It’s pretty well established that if you’re not crazy when you start taking antipsychotics, you will be if you ever try to stop taking them.

    So why pay people to take them?

    To produce more crazy people, that’s why! Otherwise, p$ychiatrists might have to get honest jobs.

    Jeeeezzzzz. Understanding that is hardly rocket science.

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