About
Thein eventually finagled his way into becoming a psychiatrist in Southern California. He changed his name to David Thein, but his new image did not keep him from accepting bribes from pharmaceutical companies for prescribing drugs of the most expensive kind, those having exclusive marketing rights while still under patent protection. In the preceding four decades, psychiatry and pharmacology had gradually unofficially, and shrewdly merged into psychopharmacology. To maximize profits, the two industries worked together to misinform the public that relied on psychotropic drugs. One of the most profitable tactics was for psychiatry to prescribe medications off-label for treating mental disorders, thus increasing the sale of drugs that the pharmaceutical companies already had in their inventories. Dr. Thein prescribed the powerful anticonvulsant Gabicon for Barry Vincent -with disastrous results. Prosperous pharmaceutical companies lavishly rewarded psychiatrists for prescribing drugs to benefit the drug makers financially rather than the patients medically. As a result of his overprescribing medications, some of Dr. Thein's patients took their own lives or died of drug-drug interactions. Because California's medicolegal authorities were not responsive to medical malpractice complaints, seven of the friends and family of the deceased patients banded together to extract justice on their own. The Mind Doctor was in for a big dose of his own medicine.