Psychiatry's Brave New World--FDA Approves Digital Sensor in Antipsychotic Drug to Enforce Prescription Compliance

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved an antipsychotic, aripiprazole, as the first drug to contain a "digital ingestion tracking system" that can tell whether the drug has been taken a technology that even a leading U.S. psychiatrist likened to "a biomedical Big Brother." The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), an international mental health industry watchdog, says Congress should investigate how the FDA could approve such technology to be used on the very same antipsychotic drug that the Agency already warned can cause damaging compulsive behavior, requiring a Black Box warning. Despite the agency's most severe warning, it is allowing the antipsychotic to be the first to utilize the digital tracking that could be used to enforce patients to take the drug, CCHR says. The new tracking system works by sending a message from the pill's sensor to a wearable patch. The patch transmits the information to a mobile application so that patients can track the ingestion of the drug on their smartphone. Caregivers and physicians may also access the information through a web-based portal.