Addressing the Global Mental Health Crisis: How a Human Rights Approach Can Help End the Search for Pharmaceutical Magic Bullets

Although there is a seductive neutrality to calls to end the “mental health crisis” and develop more effective psychotropics, these calls are grounded in a neoliberal sensibility. Such rhetoric deflects attention away from the lived realities of people’s lives and from the human rights violations that are often the cause of mental ill-health. Moreover, the undue influence of both industry and organized psychiatry in the mental health field create a perfect storm in which mental health research, policy, and clinical practice are driven by the search for pharmaceutical magic bullets. This search is facilitated by medicalized tropes, academic-industry relationships, an anti-regulatory climate, and guild interests, to the detriment of public health considerations. Indeed, an overly medicalized response to emotional distress violates patients’ human rights, including the rights to health and to informed consent. Using the conceptual and normative framework of institutional corruption, this paper identifies the various economies of influence that have paved the way for the fast-tracking of psychotropics with “novel” mechanisms of action. I discuss the marketing of postpartum distress (PPD) as a disorder of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and the “first ever” pill to treat PPD, zuranolone, as a case illustration of medicalization. I conclude by offering solutions for reform that are embedded in a human rights framework.