The Bipolar Child: Biederman And Wozniak Are Heroes

That's the view of this op-ed from yesterday's Boston Globe, penned by Jerrold Rosenbaum, chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Michael Jellinek, chief of child psychiatry at Mass Gen. That would make them Biederman and Wozniak's bosses. In part, their op-ed reads:

"These physicians are heroes to families of children with serious mental illness. Amid a firestorm of stinging and misdirected criticism, these physicians look to science to serve up hope. They use limited tools available to them--medications, talk therapies, behavioral strategies--to help children."

I've long found the tendency among researchers to describe one another's work as heroic and epic to be annoying and weirdly inhuman. Hate to let the Harvard kids in on a little secret, but I whenever I've interviewed researchers who've made such claims or talked that way, I've generally found it to be little more than self-laudatory BS. I mean, we all know you guys were the smartest--and most boring--kids in high school, but could you get over yourselves already and maybe drop the delusional talk before there's a diagnosis added to the DSM to describe it?

Here's more:

"Biederman is the most widely cited child psychiatry researcher in the scientific literature. He has moved the field of child psychiatry forward carefully, deliberately. Unlike his critics, his meticulous research has withstood intense peer-review scrutiny, and his work is backed up with rigorous science. He does not use dramatic claims or horrific allegations directed at others. He is not a self-proclaimed expert with a book to sell. Rather, he has earned--and continues to earn--the respect and admiration of his professional peers through his critical academic work and his outstanding clinical practice."

I'll let that graf stand, except to note that Biederman is given to making excessive statements. Remember this from a couple of weeks ago?

"Biederman has spread far and wide his conviction that the emotional roller coaster of bipolar disorder can start 'from the moment the child opened his eyes' at birth."

Nah, no drama there at all.