Andy Behrman - Some People Don't Know When to Stop

Chutz.pa [khoot-spuh] - noun slang 1. Supreme nerve or gall; 2. Andy Behrman.

Today, I received a spam email with this heading: "Abilify Kills: An Update on the Dangers of Abilify."

The sender is the infamous Andy Behrman, author of "Electroboy." The memoir detailed Andy's career as hustler, stripper, art forger, convicted felon, sex addict, recreational drug user, and psychiatric patient. In the book, Andy attributes his strange behavior to bipolar disorder, and back in 2002 when the book came out a sympathetic public (myself included) took him at his word.

In light of events that occurred after publication, and particularly more recently, however, it is clear that bipolar is not Andy's main diagnosis. A revisit of the book indicates there are far more believable ways to explain his deviance: novelty-seeker, drug addict, antisocial, and narcissistic all come to mind.

I do not want to play "pin-the-diagnosis" on Andy. But let's take bipolar out of the equation. Bipolar is an episodic illness: whatever happens in mania stays in mania. Andy is not like that. His behavior plays out a lot differently. To recap:

Beginning in 2004, Bristol-Myers Squibb paid Andy $400,000 over two years as a celebrity patient spokesperson for Abilify. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Andy had only been on the med for four days when he said in a promotional video that "since I switched to Abilify, almost all the side effects have gone away ... In fact, all of them have gone away."

But soon after taking the drug, Andy developed side effects (akasthesia and mental sluggishness) and had to go off the med. Nevertheless, apparently with the consent of BMS, Andy continued to deliver speeches written by BMS. He was paid $40,000 per reading.

While still a spokesman for the drug, Andy started saying bad things about it. Not surprisingly, BMS did not renew his contract. According to the WSJ, Andy asked for $7.5 million and was seeking hush money to stay quiet. Soon after his confidentiality agreement with the company ended at the end of 2008, Andy started singing a different tune.

In a spam email dated May 14, Andy wrote: "Today I am preparing to sell a new book, Adventures in the Drug Trade, which details my nightmarish experience with Abilify, my treatment by ... a former UCLA psychopharmacologist now at the Mayo Clinic and curiously no longer a medical consultant for BMS, and my experiences as a pusher of their not-so-wondrous wonder drug."

According to Andy: "Today, The Wall Street Journal published a front page story about my experience titled, 'A Celebrity Patient's Backing Turns Sour for Drug Company.'"

Andy did not link to the article, which made him look a lot worse than BMS (which is no mean feat). According to the WSJ: "Mr Behrman adds that he doesn't care what people think about his changing accounts of his experiences with Abilify. 'I think it is normal to have had a lapse in judgment because I was handled and manipulated by so many people,' he says."

In the same spam email, Andy included two links to his short YouTube video, entitled "Abilify Kills."

Today's spam email is basically a repeat of the first. Again, he lauds the WSJ for "exposing" the practices BMS and its partner Otsuka and "bringing the issue ... into public scrutiny." Again, no link to the article. Again, two links to his YouTube video.

Here's where the chutzpah part comes in. Aside from antipsychiatry bloggers, support for Andy has not been forthcoming. In two previous blog posts (here and here) I was highly condemnatory of Andy. Nevertheless, in his latest email, Andy claims: "TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE HAVE SEEN THIS VIDEO SINCE IT WAS ORIGINALLY RELEASED AND THE VIDEO HAS ALSO BEEN POSTED AND MENTIONED ON INNUMERABLE MENTAL HEALTH WEBSITES." (Caps are all his.)

Andy-Andy-Andy ...

No More Mr Nice Guy: Andy Behrman is a Con Artist and We Are His Marks

Tomorrow, I head off to San Francisco to the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting, which I attend every year as a journalist. There, I have listened to talks given by three Nobel Laureates, plus many many more by Nobel-quality scientists.

These are smart people who have dedicated their lives to improving ours. Believe me, after the week I have had here, I can't wait to get to San Francisco.

It started on Tuesday when antipsychiatry advocate Pat Risser posted this as part of a longer comment to a blog piece of mine:

"Despite all the time, money and effort spent, there is no actual proof of mental illness. There are no biochemical markers, no biological tests, no hard evidence at all, to 'prove' the existence of 'mental illness.'"

Pat Risser is a veteran of the psychiatric survivor movement from the seventies, and we owe his generation an enormous debt of gratitude for their service to our community. But, in my opinion, they are standing in the way.

Let's put it this way: If the gay community had not shaken itself out of its denial back in the eighties and kept insisting that AIDS didn't exist, how much money do you think would have gone into AIDS research and treatment?

Anyway, I started researching the issue for this blog when on Thursday the Wall Street Journal ran a front page story about a sweetheart deal gone sour between "Electroboy" Andy Behrman and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

According to the WSJ, BMS paid Andy $400,000 over two years as a celebrity patient spokesperson for Abilify. Nothing wrong with that, had the drug actually worked for Andy. But Andy had only been on the med for four days when he said in a promotional video that "since I switched to Abilify, almost all the side effects have gone away ... In fact, all of them have gone away."

Then in a live speech: "If Abilify had been available to me then, I might have avoided electroshock therapy."

Trouble was, soon after taking Abilify Andy developed side effects (akasthesia and mental sluggishness) and had to go off the med. Nevertheless, apparently with the consent of BMS, Andy continued to deliver speeches written by BMS. He was paid $40,000 per reading.

(The image you see is a photoshopped cover of BP magazine, featuring Andy and what used to be a pile of books. The "sold out" slash is from the original cover.)

The same day the WSJ story broke, a mass email from Andy arrived with this heading: "Andy Behrman Tells the Truth," with the message to read all about it in his soon-to-be-released tell-all book.

That did it. Forget about Pat Risser. Time to blog about Andy Behrman, which I posted on Thursday. The piece concluded with:

"Um, Andy. I think I'm detecting an anomaly in the truth-reality continuum here. Here is where I'm confused: If you are telling the truth now, precisely what the hell were you telling four years ago?"

That same day, Andy commented to my blog, but did not answer my question. Rather, he curiously made himself out to be a hero for disclosing that he turned down an additional $50,000 from BMS.

Nevertheless, on Friday I decided to run Andy's comments as a blog post.

This morning, I viewed his short video, entitled: "Abilify Kills." Says Andy in the video: "I stopped taking Abilify because I didn't want to experience the final side effect - death."

Okay, Andy. No more Mr Nice Guy.

According to Andy's own account in "Electroboy," as described by the WSJ: "He spent time as a stripper, swindled friends and family out of thousands of dollars for a film project he never completed, and ran an art forgery scheme that cost him five months in prison."

The subtitle of Andy's book is "A Memoir of Mania," but could well have been "A Memoir of How I Blew Cocaine Up My Nose."

Was it the mania? Was it the cocaine? Who knows? But one thing we know for certain, Andy's word counts for nothing. He's been a con artist all his life, and in true con artist fashion, he has never taken responsibility for his actions. Rather, he is an expert in reframing events to cast himself as the hero: first for disclosing his illness in Electroboy, and now for blowing the whistle on Pharma ...

He also relishes the victim role: first as a puppet at the mercy of his alleged mania, and now as the puppet caught in an evil Pharma conspiracy.

In true con artist fashion, Andy views people as marks, easy targets: First, all those he defrauded in his life as a Manhattanite on the make. Then a patient community looking for a bipolar hero. Then a low IQ drug company with money to burn together with a patient community that trusted Pharma. And, last but not least, a patient community that has turned on Pharma.

Finally, in true con artist fashion, Andy shows no remorse for his true victims, the people who believed him. "No side effects ... Abilify kills." How many patients have been harmed as a result? First those who never should have gone on Abilify. Now those who never should go off.

I wish I could say we have seen the last of Andy, but he happens to be a brilliant self-promoter. I'm sure his book will be a best-seller and that his "Electroboy" movie proposal - the one he's been telling us for the last five years is about to go into production any month now - will finally get green-lighted.

Ironically, we inherited both Andy and Abilify from Pat Risser's generation. Had our community actually been blessed with smart advocates - like those AIDS heroes who demanded and got serious funding - we might actually have much better treatments right now.

Instead ...

Enough. Time to start packing. Tomorrow, I'll be in San Francisco listening to smart people. It can't come soon enough.

Andy Behrman Replies

Yesterday, I posted a piece that was less than complementary concerning Andy Behrman's involvement as a celebrity patient spokesperson for Bristol-Myers Squibb, makers of Abilify. Andy is the author of "Electroboy."

In response, Andy posted a comment stating his position. Without comment, I'm reposting his remarks here:

I'd like to set the record straight. I'd like to explain what was not mentioned in the article in the Wall Street Journal. I'd like to explain that WHILE I was still employed by Bristol-Myers Squibb, I spoke at a DBSA convention in Sacramento and to an audience of hundreds of people and disclosed the fact that I suffered from side effects - akathasia and cognitive impairment - from Abilify (and this was at an event at which BMS was a sponsor).

But until then, even after I complained about my side effects to my doctor, Dr. Mark Frye, a BMS consultant, I was begged not to discuss my side effects and that "we'll prop you up on other meds until things 'even out.'"

They tried. It didn't work. I ultimately told a BMS employee at the time (now at Otsuka) that I suffered from side effects and was no longer taking the drug. I was told that it wasn't "necessary to bring this up." So finally, I spoke up about my situation - in public - and then wrote about it - on about.com/bipolar - and BMS made sure that those statements were removed.

I was convinced by my own doctor and several BMS employees that it was "normal to have side effects and that there was no reason to go off Abilify." I disagreed. I finally came off Abilify and went public with the story.

I was constantly reminded by more than 15 people managing me, that "it was all fine." I told the truth. I wasn't re-hired. Curiously, even after BMS/Otsuka knew that I had side effects and was NOT on the drug, I was asked to speak - six months later - as a successful patient for a 50th Anniversary Celebration for Otsuka in L.A.

I was offered $50,000. I turned down the invitation. I was also told that it was "okay" to speak for Otsuka, because it was a separate company from BMS. I have always told the truth about my experience with Abilify. But more importantly, BMS made every effort to cover up the truth. And now, because I'm blowing the whistle on them, they don't even have a real comment, except for, "we didn't know."

They knew EVERYTHING. It's curious that my doctor and their medical director, Dr. Mark Frye, is no longer employed by them. I think people will be curious to see his medical records which he kept of my treatment and perhaps to learn more about media training that BMS gave to me. Or to see the speeches that they wrote for me. There's a lot that was not reported in a 3,000 word front page story.

But I think the real story here is that companies like BMS not only hide side effects (like akathasia), but do whatever they can do when they see that their spokesman, the guy who launched their big drug, is failing on it.

What's Wrong with Pharma? They Don't Listen to Their Customers

In my last blog piece, I presented a simplified overview of the appalling Pharma management practices that have resulted in no truly new psychiatric meds on the market in more than 50 years, with no replacement drugs on tap that they can even pretend to call new.

What went wrong? Lots of things. But it all boils down to this one cardinal sin: Pharma never listened to its customers.

My background as a finance/business journalist has given me considerable insight into this. Back in the late eighties, when I lived in Australia, I co-wrote a book with a prominent businessperson there, entitled "The Customer," which went to number two on the best-seller list.

It's all about organizing your business around the customer. If management isn't directly serving the customer, then they need to be serving the people serving the customer. It's amazing how entire industries get this principle wrong. Detroit, for instance, has always dictated the terms of the customer relationship. Marketing, to them, is about conditioning us into acceptance rather than finding out what we want.

Look at where Detroit is now.

Detroit, at least, pretends to listen to the customer. Pharma? Let me tell you a story:

Two years ago, I was at a book launch on the east coast. I grabbed some finger food and started up a conversation with a pharmacology expert from Bristol-Myers Squibb.

"Maybe you can enlighten me," I opened. I had been doing some research into dopamine and had pretty well concluded that stimulants and antipsychotics amounted to "dumb" dopamine meds.

We needed "smart" dopamine meds. Surely, Bristol-Myers Squibb was aware of the situation. Surely, such a drug was at least on their radar screens, if not their drawing boards.

(For background on the issue, please see For Discussion: Dopamine Cocktail.)

We actually have a smart dopamine med, the man informed me. "Aripiprozole."

Surely, he misunderstood. Nothing against Aripiprozole (Abilify), but it's been on the market for years. I was looking into the future. I realized he wasn't in a position to disclose any company trade secrets, but he could at least fill me in on some general principles, namely: Where were the next new meds going to come from?

I'm a customer. I have a right to ask.

It was if the man hadn't heard me. Once again, he started talking about aripiprozole, undoubtedly the exact same pitch he gives to psychiatrists. For years, BMS has been telling doctors that aripiprozole is a "Goldilocks" drug - not too much dopamine, not too little, just right.

Stop trying to sell me something. I'm a journalist. I've heard it all before.

Again, I tried to get the conversation back on track. Again, the man tied to shove his stupid drug down my throat. It never occurred to him to ask me why I was so interested in a "smart" dopamine med in the first place.

Were there special challenges I faced that a smart dopamine med might address? he could have asked.

Was there anything about my illness that he needed to know, that he wasn't finding out about from psychiatrists? If a "magic bullet" were to come on the market tomorrow, how would this affect my life? What impact would a safer and more effective med have on my compliance?

Believe it or not, this man could have learned a lot from me. So could BMS and their competitors. Let me assure you, no one in the entire drug industry has even bothered to ask. I'm a patient author and advocate, so if they're not interested in me then I know they are not interested in you, either.

Actually, BMS did bring a patient author on board, Andy Behrman, author of "Electroboy," but in the capacity as a spokesperson - a grateful patient - for Abilify. The arrangement worked fine until the drug pooped out and Andy went public. Then all hell broke loose. (Never piss off a writer: Andy has a tell-all book coming out.)

So what happens to companies not interested in listening to their customers? We know the answer. The evidence is there. Detroit, Wall Street, Pharma ...

"How deserted lies the city," says Lamentations, "once so full of people!"

It's tempting to say, "good riddance," but if Pharma goes down, what becomes of us?