Non-profit is one of those words … It’s like Maria… the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard… all the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word… non-profit…

Yet we’ll never get anywhere, mes enfants, until we take a cold eye even to that most beautiful of words. And not only when multiply-billioned megaliths like Harvard continue to present themselves as non-profit pebbles. When advocacy organizations are over-indebted to corporations, they also should receive scrutiny.

… In a letter sent today to the National Alliance for Mental Illness, based in Arlington, Virginia, [Senator Charles] Grassley asked the nonprofit group to disclose any financial backing from drug companies or from foundations created by the industry.

The Iowa Republican, in a series of hearings and investigations, has focused on financial ties between the drug industry, doctors and academic institutions. His efforts have led New York-based Pfizer Inc. to begin disclosing consulting payments to U.S. doctors, and Harvard Medical School in Boston to reexamine its conflict-of-interest policies. Now Grassley is expanding his inquiries to nonprofit groups.

“I have come to understand that money from the pharmaceutical industry shapes the practices of nonprofit organizations which purport to be independent in their viewpoints and actions,” Grassley wrote in his letter.

Officials at the National Alliance for Mental Illness didn’t return calls for comment.

The group identifies itself as the largest grassroots organization in the U.S. for people with mental illness and their families. The group came under scrutiny in 1999, when the magazine Mother Jones reported that 18 drug companies gave the group $11.7 million from 1996 to mid-1999. The article reported that at one point an executive of Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly & Co. worked out of the nonprofit group’s headquarters…

A writer at PsychCentral provides some detail:

… The problem with the National Alliance for Mental Illness and Mental Health America (formerly known as the National Mental Health Association), among others, is their simple lack of transparency about their funding sources. NAMI, for instance, doesn’t break out its donations by source. If it did, I suspect we’d see that somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of its donations come from pharmaceutical companies, affiliated companies, or individual employees and management from within pharma. For other nonprofits, I would expect similar percentages.

The long-held secret of these national non-profits doing important advocacy and policy work in mental health is simply this — without the pharmaceutical monies they receive, they probably wouldn’t exist today. They are dependent upon them and some of them would rather you not know how dependent upon them they really are.

Does such money buy influence? Well, with NAMI, the answer appears to be an unequivocal “Yes.” NAMI has long pushed that severe mental illness — like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders — are pure neurobiological medical diseases (or as they call them, “biologically based brain disorders”).

The primary treatment method pushed by NAMI national? Medications, of course. For instance, in their consumer article about depression, 84 percent of the article is devoted to medications and only 10 percent mentions psychotherapy. ..