You’re in pharma – do you miss treating patients?

This question comes up a lot when I talk to colleagues in clinical practice or academia, and the answer is an unequivocal “no”! Here’s why…

First, I come from an advantageous position because I practised psychiatry intensely for nine years. When I finished my psychiatry training in Mumbai, I was one of the youngest in my class, and I was restless, so I decided to go straight into practising psychiatry in large tertiary as well as primary care setups. By the time I was in my early 30s, I had a busy practice spanning multiple premium hospitals in New Delhi.

I must have been firing on all the cylinders at that time! As if all this wasn’t enough, every alternate Sunday after working 12 hours a day for six days, I used to drive 100 miles to a small charitable hospital in a village outside Delhi where I started a community psychiatric centre. There were always hundreds of people arriving by buses, tractors, bullock carts and waiting patiently in line for their turn. Most of them were poor, some of them barely surviving, and on top of that, they had to deal with mental illness. That experience of serving at the grass root level has kept me grounded to this day. Every time I hear of a new therapeutic concept, a mechanism of action, and people get excited about the science, I always think of the end game. Where will it eventually land, and will it really make a difference in people's life or not? That's my litmus test.

My second advantage – or disadvantage – was that I was working in psychiatry. Take for example if you’re working in say, cardiology, there is a lot you can do to reverse the damage and help people get back on their feet. This is not the case in psychiatry. Apart from a handful of conditions e.g. depression and anxiety, you still can’t “cure” most major psychiatric illnesses – the patient just has to live with them, despite the advances in modern psychiatry medicine. All you can do is symptomatically address a handful of symptoms, and most of the times even that leaves a lot to be desired for the patients and the caregivers. So, after nine years of this intense work, I found myself asking, “Am I going to do this for the rest of my life? Can I do more? And what would that ‘more’ be?”

The randomness of life brought me to the clinical research and even after 12 years in clinical research, the more I learn, the humbler I become. I’ve realised the challenges of science, regulations, scale, commercialisation and stigma. You feel the whole weight of responsibility which lies on you. But that doesn't decrease my sense of purpose, or my love of teamwork. Sometimes physicians prescribing new drugs don't fully understand the effort it takes to bring them to market i.e., the hundreds, if not thousands of people behind one project’s entire lifecycle.

People used to think of pharma as a blood-sucking machine with an evil agenda – that we sit around at night plotting world domination! But when people find out about what we really do, their views change. When I announced, I was switching to clinical research, a former mentor and professor said to me, “Good luck. You’re lost to the cause of psychiatry.” Few years down the line, I met him again at a conference and he said, “I can’t be prouder of you.”

I truly value the years I spent in clinical practice, but now I get the chance to make a difference on a global scale. And I get to see patients vicariously through the eyes of my medical colleagues. I am still seeing patients – just through a different lens.

If you are looking to make a difference on a global scale, we are hiring. See our jobs page for more information.

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