If you aren’t suffering from panic attacks, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, or some other mental problem, you may nevertheless be the victim of a serious mental malady that you just don’t recognize. At least that’s what pharmaceutical companies that sell their selective reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, would like you to believe. Not content with the obscene profits from their sales of SSRIs, these companies seek out new mental illnesses, then promote their pills as panaceas.

One of their latest discoveries is generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), which paralyzes its victims with irrational fears. Although a 1989 study concluded that, in any given year, only 1.2 percent of the population was affected by this “forgotten illness,” GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Paxil, needed to raise GAD’s profile to fill the company’s coffers with the profits from Paxil’s new use. So the PR people diligently set to work. As Brendan I. Koerner reveals in his incisive article “Disorders Made to Order” in the July-August issue of Mother Jones, the company’s strategy—“marketing a disease rather than selling a drug”—is common in the post-Prozac era. “Typically, a corporate-sponsored ‘disease awareness’ campaign focuses on a mild psychiatric condition with a large pool of potential sufferers.”

A drug’s success in treating the affliction is proved by company-funded studies; prominent physicians publicly declare the illness is widespread; campaigns are launched to promote the new disease; and patients are recruited to tell their tearful pre-treatment stories. As Canadian epidemiologist Barbara Mintzes, quoted by Koerner, says: “There are 10 million Americans with this, 3 million Americans with that. If you start adding up all those millions, eventually you’ll be hard put to find some Americans who don’t have such diagnoses.”

As if the millions of dollars that GlaxoSmithKline rakes in by its sales of Paxil for GAD were not enough, the company in 1998 applied for FDA approval to market Paxil for a condition called social phobia or “social anxiety disorder” (SAD), a type of shyness that psychiatrists admit is “extremely rare.” Nowhere in its various GAD and SAD campaigns did the PR dynamos mention Paxil’s unpleasant side effects.

(To add fuel to the farce, Time, in its June 10 issue, ran a cover story titled “The Science of Anxiety” (which at least suggested alternative treatments in addition to drugs), and followed it up in its July 1 issue with its anxiety-producing cover story “Apocalypse Now” . . .)