By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
What Dick
Cheney is to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, psychiatrist Joseph Biederman is to the
explosion of psychiatric medications in American children. Recently, Biederman
was nailed by congressional investigators and the New York Times for
overestimating just how greedy an elite shrink is entitled to be. Beyond a peek
into the corruption of psychiatry at its highest levels, the scandal is an
opportunity to reconsider the Big Pharma financed view of why kids become
disruptive and destructive.
On June 8,
2008, the New York Times reported the following about Joseph Biederman: "A
world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an
explosion in the use of powerful anti-psychotic medicines in children earned at
least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but
for years did not report much of this income to university officials, according
to information given congressional investigators."
Due in part
to Biederman's influence, the number of American children and adolescents
treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003, and as
Bloomberg News reported (September 2007), "The expanded use of bipolar as
a pediatric diagnosis has made children the fastest-growing part of the $11.5
billion U.S. market for anti-psychotic drugs."
Pediatrician
and author Lawrence Diller notes about Biederman, "He single-handedly put
pediatric bipolar disorder on the map." Biederman has been in a position
to convince many doctors to diagnose bipolar disorder in children and to
medicate them with anti-psychotic drugs. In addition to being a professor at
Harvard, Biederman is also chief of research in pediatric psychopharmacology at
the Massachusetts General Hospital, which publishes more than 30 papers yearly
on psychiatric disorders. And Biederman himself has authored and co-authored
approximately 500 articles, 70 book chapters, and more than 450 scientific
abstracts, as well as being on the editorial board of many professional
journals.
Biederman
(and two of his colleagues in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical
School who received an additional $2.6 million from drug companies from 2000 to
2007), by failing to report income from drug companies while at the same time
receiving federal funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), violated
rules designed to police conflicts of interest, according to Sen. Charles Grassley,
R-Iowa. Grassley concluded, "Obviously, if a researcher is taking money
from a drug company while also receiving federal dollars to research that
company's product, then there is a conflict of interest." In one example,
Biederman neglected to report his 2001 income from Johnson & Johnson
(makers of the anti-psychotic drug Risperdal); Johnson & Johnson reported
to Grassley that it had paid Biederman $58,169 in 2001.
In addition
to his popularization of bipolar disorder for children, Biederman is one of the
most significant forces behind the commonplace diagnosis of attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder. Congressional investigators also found that Biederman
conducted studies of Eli Lilly's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder drug
Strattera that were funded by NIH at the same time he was receiving money from
Lilly that exceeded the maximum amount permitted.
NIH rules
state that researchers cannot take more than $20,000 in payments from a drug
company whose drug they are funded by NIH to research and that researchers must
disclose any payment received from a drug company of $10,000 or more.
Apparently, for drug researchers taking federal funding from NIH, there is no
law against being on the take from drug companies, but there are rules against
greed.
Mental health
treatment in the United States is now a multibillion-dollar industry, and all
the rules of industrial complexes apply. Not only does Big Pharma have
influential psychiatrists such as Biederman in their pocket, virtually every
mental health institution from which doctors, the press, and the general public
receive their mental health information is financially interconnected with Big
Pharma. The American Psychiatric Association, psychiatry's professional
organization, is hugely dependent on drug company grants, and this is also true
for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and other so-called consumer
organizations. Harvard and other prestigious university psychiatry departments
take millions of dollars from drug companies, and the National Institute of
Mental Health funds researchers who are financially connected with drug
companies.
The corporate
media, dependent on drug company advertising, occasionally reports on egregious
scandals, but the corporate media is generally timid in reporting the big
picture of how drug companies spread around millions of dollars to make
billions of dollars.
There are
certainly many troubled and disruptive American children who are sometimes
extremely destructive to themselves or others. However, any attempt to
understand these kids will be corrupted by financial dependency on drug
companies, which have a vested interest in viewing all attentional, emotional,
and behavioral difficulties as diseases that can be fixed with drugs.
There are
several commonsense nondisease reasons why children become troubled and behave
disruptively and destructively. For more than two decades, I have worked with
annoying, disruptive, and destructive children. Many of these children had been
previously diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
oppositional defiant disorder, bipolar disorder, and other serious psychiatric
diagnoses, and they were routinely given a variety of drug combinations. Their
parents most often reported that drugs were prescribed after being questioned
by doctors about symptoms but without any exploration of reasons as to why
their children were behaving as they did.
In America's
assembly-line medicine, drug prescriptions are routinely written without any
exploration of commonsense reasons as to why a child might be behaving
problematically. Is the child resentful over a perceived injustice? Is the
child experiencing deep emotional pain? Is the child simply bored? Does the
child feel powerless? Does the child have low self-worth because a lack of life
skills and thus behaves immaturely so no expectations are placed on him or her?
Is the child starving for attention? Has the child lost respect for his or her
parents because these adults have not acted like adults? Has the child's basic
physical needs--such as proper nutrition, physical activity, or sleep--not been
met? Routinely, few if any of these areas are explored before a prescription is
written.
One of the
most common reasons that children behave problematically is that well-meaning
parents are having difficulty relating to their child's personality. Perhaps
the parents are, by nature, compliant and conformist, and their child has a
nonconformist and rebellious temperament. Good parents feel guilty when they
have difficulty relating to their child, but all of us--including doctors--are
human, and we all need to admit our limitations. The reality is that children
who feel that nobody "gets them" are more likely to be troubled and
disruptive.
In another
era, if a parent had difficulty relating to his or her child, there would more
likely be at least one grandparent, uncle, aunt, friend, or other adult in the
community who could easily relate. In our increasingly disconnected society,
there are increasing numbers of children without even one adult who they
believe relates to them.
Moreover, as
society demands increasing machinelike efficiency, more of us--children and
adults--will not be able to fit in; but a corporate media cannot confront a
corporate culture that produces widespread painful alienation, which in turn
creates a variety of attentional, emotional and behavioral problems. The
corporate media may at times report on egregious corruption of an individual or
an institution, but it does not ask this question: In an increasingly homogenized
and standardized society, should we drug those who do not neatly fit in--or
should we consider transforming such a society?
Bruce E.
Levine, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America's
Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone
Crazy (Chelsea Green, 2007).
