Bipolar disorder is described as a chemical imbalance which describes a lifetime of medication but at least the narrator suggests that bipolar disorder is a controversial label. Sadly the NYT piece is described as "doing a good job," and describes parents as trying therapy and it doesn't work because the kid is bipolar. Sick. Therapy has a low success rate. Diagnosing a kid as sick because they don't respond to a child psychologist is grotesque. And then there's a woman who thinks her two year old is bipolar.
Witch hunt that harms child. The woman thinks her child is bipolar and adhd. I'm sure thinking something like that about your child would cause bad behavior but this woman started giving her child ritalan and zoloft when she was 6 cause or treatment?

pshrink says psych diagnosis is not a science but is an art and that many things look like bipolar disorder even though he still recommends drugs and criticizes "anti psychiatrists." Hopefully he says that one day the science will become so tight it will be unethical not to treat these children. It doesn't occur to him that it's unethical to treat the kids with no science to back it up, then psychobitch mother says that her daughter wasn't diagnosed until she was sixteen and it wasn't until she institutionalized her daughter at 16 that she was able to sleep through the night. Hmmm woman reports not having slept through the night for 16 years - maybe she's the one that needs drugs and imprisonment in a psych hospital. This is sort of like a pre nazi eugenics broadcast. Terrible.

One more thing, Carl Bell says and I quote: "trying a drug for a while that a child doesn't need is probably not going to damage the child." Probably not? Would he really treat his child this way? Probably as pshrinks are notoriously bad parents in general.

I've pretty much stopped policing NPR too. Let's face it -- they claim to be non-profit and they're funded by all those foundations but if you look at the foundations, well, there's pharma money behind some of them anyway (as in Johnson and Johnson for one). After that Infinite Mind show that was just off the charts in terms of bias I think it's best to stay away. I was even interviewed for a show once in which as the "antidote" to my point of view they had a teen patient supposedly doing well with treatment for depression only they forgot to say it wasn't an SSRI -- they'd been on that and you guessed it -- they didn't do well so they were on some other cocktail. When I found that out after the show (and it wasn't disclosed on the show) I got pretty darn hopping mad at the producer. She said they couldn't find anyone doing well on just an SSRI who was willing to talk -- can you believe it? And this is supposed to be objective journalism?