At my med school (in UK) there was one consultant psychiatrist in particular who made a point of encouraging us to avoid all contact with the pharmaceutical companies and not to accept all the freebies they offered us (free lunches, equipment, pens, medical conference fees etc) nor to accept appointments with their sales people as he said it makes you less objective about prescribing drugs. Prescribing should only be done on good clinical grounds and only when in the best interests of the patient. I remember after his talk, which boldly was at a pharm company sponsored meeting to discuss clinical psychiatry, I went to the cafeteria for lunch and he and I were the only ones there buying our own lunch all the other docs and med students were having the free food provided by the pharm company.
There is quite a strong relationship between psychiatry and the big pharmas. A lot of clinical research funding come from them inevitably, however they are in the business of selling drugs and that also involves getting docs to prescribe them. Increasingly psychiatrists are not providing non-drug therapies such as psychotherapy and long consultations etc and are becoming locked into an alphabet-soup diagnostic trend and in precribing multiple medications for those supposed conditions (comorbidities). Worringly children are being diagnosed at an earlier age with psychiatric illness and prescribed drugs that potentially may have and have had in some notable recent cases, serious side-effects.
