I liked this article by Gary Greenberg about one psychiatrist’s criticism of the upcoming DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) revision. The DSM is the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association.
This paragraph stood out for me:
This new disease reminded Frances of one of his keenest regrets about the DSM-IV: its role, as he perceives it, in the epidemic of bipolar diagnoses in children over the past decade. Shortly after the book came out, doctors began to declare children bipolar even if they had never had a manic episode and were too young to have shown the pattern of mood change associated with the disease. Within a dozen years, bipolar diagnoses among children had increased 40-fold. Many of these kids were put on antipsychotic drugs, whose effects on the developing brain are poorly understood but which are known to cause obesity and diabetes. In 2007, a series of investigative reports revealed that an influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar disorder in kids, the Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, failed to disclose money he’d received from Johnson & Johnson, makers of the bipolar drug Risperdal, or risperidone. (The New York Times reported that Biederman told the company his proposed trial of Risperdal in young children “will support the safety and effectiveness of risperidone in this age group.”) Frances believes this bipolar “fad” would not have occurred had the DSM-IV committee not rejected a move to limit the diagnosis to adults.
Emphasis added. Hundreds of thousands of children given brain-damaging drugs because . . . well, one big reason is that Harvard allows its faculty to do what Biederman did. Forced to choose between Harvard and drug company money, Biederman would choose Harvard. I am glad Professor Ross Anderson, a Cambridge computer science professor, turned down an industry request to censor a student, but I am sorry he said the person making the request had “a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work.”
American Psychiatric Association incompetence.
Via The Browser.
Biederman should recognize that the trial should not be conducted because the trial “will support the safety and effectiveness”. He already knows the result so it would be better not to spend the resources on the trial.
The notion of a drug safety and efficacy trial being conducted by someone who says he knows what the results will be is obscene. That the drug will be given to children makes it doubly obscene. That Biederman got millions for this sort of thing and failed to report it merely confirms what a horrible person he is. That Harvard lets him do this speaks volumes about Harvard. This is far worse than plagiarism and making up data (both of which Harvard tolerates, at least with its faculty).
This reminds me of that turn of phrase “I like to think that…”. Why do people talk that way?