Physicians and other prescribers have been combining serotonin antidepressants with Buspar for years. The combination is also considerably less expensive. Who knows, maybe Viibryd will deliver the goods, and the drug is not simply a retread like so many others that preceded it to market.
The holy grail of antidepressant treatment remains elusive, but exciting advances have certainly left the starting blocks. I can imagine a day when a clinician, faced with a patient who has major depression, will be able to order a gene scan that will predict response to a certain medication. This will ease the burden on the trial-and-error, hit-or-miss process that unfortunately characterizes so much of antidepressant management today.
Joe Wegmann is a licensed clinical social worker and a clinical pharmacist with over 30 years of experience in counseling and medication treatment of depression and anxiety. Go to Top. Mental illness doesn't affect everyone equally, and mental health disorders can range from minor to debilitating. The large number of people impacted by mental illness makes it a common target for drug companies.
There are a lot of people in need — and not all are being served well. This creates an incentive for drug companies to develop newer, more effective drugs to better serve these particular patients.
Viibryd — a relatively new antidepressant drug — falls into this category. As a new antidepressant, it's gained significant popularity, becoming a commonly prescribed drug relatively quickly. Viibryd, or vilazodone, is a medication used to treat depression , or specifically, major depressive disorder. It is what is known as a serotonin modulator and stimulator, or SMS. It is believed to work like an SSRI, with the addition of impacting another specific serotonin receptor in the brain.
It was approved for the Canadian market in While it was initially licensed and marketed by Forest Laboratories, that company was acquired by Actavis, which then became Allergan after the Irish company Actavis acquired the US company Allergan.
Viibryd is notable as an antidepressant because it differs from the typical SSRIs — which tend to be some of the most commonly prescribed antidepressants. These include drugs like Lexapro escitalopram , Paxil paroxetine , Prozac fluoxetine , and Celexa citalopram. This is mainly because of that additional receptor in the brain that it affects. New antidepressants are being researched all the time — and for good reason.
Even a minor improvement could mean billions. In Viibryd's case, the company that developed it pushed early on claiming that it had fewer sexual side effects compared to other SSRIs.
Sexual side effects are prominent in SSRIs, and are one of the most common complaints against them, along with weight gain. For this reason, creating a weight neutral or libido neutral antidepressant that is still effective has been a major goal of the pharmaceutical industry.
Doing so would surely lead to huge profits. With that said, while the company behind Viibryd claims it has fewer sexual side effects, the FDA doesn't necessarily agree. In fact, to quote the FDA , "Vilazodone is a new treatment for MDD, but it is unknown whether it has any advantages compared to other drugs in the antidepressant class.
That doesn't mean that it isn't effective, however. Still, despite that, Viibryd has been marketed effectively. It's currently prescribed to over one million Americans. Because it is a new drug and is protected by patent law, there is no generic. Through NorthWestPharmacy. To be blunt, there's a lot of money in the industry of developing mental health drugs.
While many Americans suffer from some form of mental illness, many aren't comfortable talking to their doctor or otherwise seeking treatment. Statistics show that young people are being increasingly affected by anxiety — and they aren't getting the help that they need.
An increasing number of young people are also being impacted by depression. At the end of the day, all of this means that there is a huge market for drug companies to take advantage of. People are sad, tired, and worn out, and they need help.
Drug companies are more than happy to help out — as long as people are willing to pay. Due to the lack of regulatory oversight on drug pricing in the United States, marketing costs, greed, research and development costs, and patent law, most "new" drugs like Viibryd command a high price. Pharmaceutical companies operate like every other business — they exist to drive a profit for their owners and shareholders. Just because they're selling a product that so many Americans desperately need to feel normal, doesn't mean that they are going to give it away.
In fact, that demand is reason for them to charge even more. This is one of the reasons why drug companies are always developing new pharmaceuticals. If you develop a new drug, you can patent it — and if you can patent it, you can control its price without having to worry about generic competitors for 20 years.
Regardless, let's talk about those points we mentioned above and break them down, one by one:. The United States lacks a regulatory framework for challenging drug makers on how much they charge for drugs. Most developed countries have some sort of framework in place that keeps the cost of drugs down. For some, this means a single-payer system, in which the government is the only purchaser of drugs and medical services — meaning that they can aggressively negotiate down the cost.
Essentially, if they don't buy them, no one will, so this forces drug companies to play ball. In others, there is a firm system in place that caps the amount of money drug companies can charge.
In the United States, however, no such system exists. In America, you pay what the drug companies want you to pay. This doesn't mean that other countries are perfect — or that everyone gets their medication for free — but it does mean that most Americans will pay more for their medication than citizens from around the world.
This is why Canadians pay less for medications than Americans, even though many Canadians pay considerably more than the citizens of other countries! There are only two countries in the world that allow drug companies to advertise directly to consumers : New Zealand and the United States. Of course, drug companies don't limit their marketing to consumers — they also target psychiatrists directly.
This was the case with Clinical Data , one of the firms behind Viibryd. They hired a team of sales representatives to reach out to psychiatrists and primary care physicians to tell them about the benefits of their brand-new drug.
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