Texas Medical Algorithm Project
The Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP) is a controversial set of psychiatric management guidelines designed to enable doctors to systematically screen and treat potential patients for subjectively diagnosed mental disorders within Texas' publicly funded mental health care system. TMAP is the result of a collaboration between pharmaceutical companies, the University of Texas Southwestern, and the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation (TDMHMR). TMAP was initiated in the fall of 1997 as the result of an intensive effort by drug companies to expand markets for newer, more expensive psychoactive pharmaceuticals, and to provide more uniform early intervention screening and treatment for Texas children. A medical algorithm is any computation, formula, survey, or look-up table, useful in healthcare.
TMAP is a typical, corporate-sponsored "disease awareness" campaign, focused on screening for psychiatric conditions with large pools of potential sufferers. Pharmaeceutical companies fund studies that "prove" the efficacy of drug treatment algorithms in treating subjectively diagnosed afflictions, and are now promoting nationwide screening programs, based on TMAP, to establish and secure viable markets. Patient groups are recruited to serve as fronts for newly minted diagnostic conditions, supplying quotes and compelling anecdotal stories for the media. TMAP is part of a wider effort by drug companies to obtain FDA approvals for psychotropic drugs for a widening array of new uses, or 'indications'. Prominent doctors and medical shools have been enlisted to publicly affirm the ubiquity of, and critical need for aggressive treattment of, mental disorders. TMAP dovetails with other drug industry marketing strategies that rely heavily upon public relations firms. Massive lobbying efforts have been funded to promote the expansion of TMAP nationally, through an initiative called the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. Non-profit front groups, and lobbying campaigns for programs like TMAP, are heavily subsidized by drug makers, often operating directly out of the offices of drug company's PR firms.