The folks at the Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation--that's the Papaloses of "The Bipolar Child" book fame's organization--have really gone an done it now. They've fully crossed the Rubicon and now claim that kids having nightmares, wetting the bed and who...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 16, 2009 12:03 AM
A little noticed study came out in the obscure Journal of Mental Health Policy and Economics in September from a researcher at Yale University and a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Jason Fletcher and Barbara Wolfe respectively. It's not...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 13, 2009 12:03 AM
A study out in this month's British Journal of Psychiatry examined the course of bipolar disorder for as long as 15 years in the offspring of bipolar parents and found no evidence of pre-adolescent mania: "We studied the course of...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 4, 2009 12:05 AM
JC, a reader from Back East somewhere, left a comment yesterday that I broke out as a post because he fooled me into thinking he really was one of the Biederman groupies, bipolar child defenders, etc. His comment was so...
Posted in Furious Seasons on October 29, 2009 12:01 AM
A child psychiatrist at Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley, California named Edmund Levin has thrown before his colleagues a major gauntlet, aimed in particular at the bio-psychiatry, bipolar child proponents at Harvard. In a paper in the Journal of...
Posted in Furious Seasons on October 22, 2009 12:05 AM
I've been wrestling with how to say something sensible about the Senate Finance Committee's health care reform bill, but what can you say when the country is literally ripping itself apart over the shape of the reforms and an unexpected...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 18, 2009 12:03 AM
On Tuesday I wrote of a possible non-disclosure of pharma monies by Joan Luby, a Washington University psychiatry professor, in an August 2009 paper in the Archives of General Psychiatry. In that paper, which asserted that child as young as...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 3, 2009 12:03 AM
There's been a lot of criticism of ex-Abilify spokespatient/"Electroboy" author Andy Behrman in the wake of last week's front page Wall Street Journal article about his split with Bristol-Myers Squibb. The company had paid him a reported $400,000 to speak...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 19, 2009 12:01 AM
I learned yesterday that the Alliance for Human Research Protection last week sent a letter to the president of Harvard University, calling for the school to order a broad-based, independent review of the work of controversial Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 21, 2009 12:01 AM
I'm sure some of you will get a chuckle out of this: in November, the International Forum on Mood and Anxiety Disorders (website) will hold its annual conference, this year in Monaco, and one of the conference topics will be...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 17, 2009 12:01 AM
I generally don't post on weekends, but news is just out that controversial Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman and his colleagues Tim Wilens and Thomas Spencer were named in a federal subpoena yesterday. The trio have all pulled in millions...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 28, 2009 10:55 AM
In a deposition in a lawsuit against J&J/Janssen, controversial Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman testified under oath and was asked what rank of professor he is at Harvard. His answer is revealing about more than Biederman. (Via the In Vivo...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 20, 2009 01:04 PM
The New York Times is reporting that controversial Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman was selling J&J/Janssen on results of clinical trials in children of its antipsychotic Risperdal and its stimulant Concerta in advance of conducting the actual studies. Biederman is...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 20, 2009 12:01 AM
An ironic and odd tale has come to my attention, one involving the editor-in-chief of JAMA, Catherine DeAngelis, researchers who failed to report conflicts of interest to the journal on a Lexapro study, and DeAngelis calling one other researcher, who...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 12, 2009 12:03 AM
I've now seen a copy of the federal complaint against Forest Labs for allegedly illegally promoting Lexapro and Celexa for use in children, both uses for which the company has no approvals. It's the usual tale of ignoring negative clinical...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 26, 2009 11:54 AM
On Friday, New York Times "op-extra" columnist/blogger/sometime pharma apologist Judith Warner offered her take on news that some of those kids dumped on the State of Nebraska last year, during that state's doomed "safe haven" law experiment, were mentally ill....
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 23, 2009 12:03 AM
So John McManamy has gone and done it--gone and called my writing "dumb antipsychiatry." Seriously, you can check out that humdinger right here. McManamy is the author of "Living Well with Depression and Bipolar Disorder," but one wonders how well...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 20, 2009 12:01 AM
Today, I am beginning the spring fundraiser for this site. Yes, I know it's still technically winter, but the fundraiser in early December was dubbed winter, so this one shall be spring. I'm starting this fundraiser five days earlier than...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 18, 2009 12:05 AM
The other day I noted a newspaper article in Boston in which defenders of controversial Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman voiced their support for the embattled doctor. I thought what I wrote was pretty tame and non-critical of either the...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 6, 2009 12:03 AM
I know those of you who dislike the controversial Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, creator of the bipolar child paradigm among other things, won't especially care for this Boston Globe article from the other day wherein Biederman is defended by...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 3, 2009 12:03 AM
On Dec. 31 news came out that Joseph Biederman, the controversial Harvard child psychiatrist, had agreed to forego any industry funding of his work while various conflict of interest allegations against him are being investigated by officials at Massachusetts General...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 5, 2009 12:03 AM
Amidst the many bizarre revelations around the conflict of interest scandal around academic psychiatric researchers and Big Pharma being probed by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) comes the oddest revelation of them all. In 2000, Emory University psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff wrote...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 18, 2008 11:45 AM
Ironically, two separate op-eds by two different children's doctors appeared yesterday. Each made similar and different points. First up was Leonard Sax, a psychologist and physician and author of Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving The Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 15, 2008 12:03 AM
I don't have much to add here, but Joseph Biederman--the controversial Harvard child psychiatrist caught up in a conflict of interest scandal--has written a letter to the Boston Globe. There's an account of it in this article here, wherein the...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 9, 2008 01:57 PM
The following was written by Gene Combs, a psychiatrist in Illinois who has also written books about narrative therapy, including "Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities." Combs is also an associate professor of psychiatry at Loyola University, Chicago....
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 9, 2008 12:03 AM
Recently, I was poking through the package insert for Risperdal, an atypical antipsychotic made by Johnson & Johnson/Janssen, when I noticed that in its discussion of clinical studies for the drug's use in treating pediatric bipolar disorder, only one study...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 4, 2008 12:03 AM
John McManamy, who blogs over at HealthCentral.com on bipolar disorder and depression, has for the second time gone after the New York Times and its crack reporter Gardiner Harris, who covers public health for the paper in its DC bureau,...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 4, 2008 12:01 AM
You read that headline right. A new study came out yesterday in the Archives of General Psychiatry asserting that about half of college-age Americans have a psychiatric disorder of some kind during a one-year period. The study abstract is not...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 2, 2008 12:01 AM
Danny Carlat, a Tufts University psychiatrist, writes of the conflict of interest scandals around Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman and leading bipolar disorder researcher Fred Goodwin today. Of particular interest to me was Carlat's account of Goodwin's response to a...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 1, 2008 10:23 AM
As I do every three months, today I'm beginning this site's winter fundraiser. The goal is to raise $3,000 over the next two weeks. The fall fundraiser was a big success and ended early, and I hope that's the case...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 1, 2008 12:05 AM
On Sunday, the New York Times' editorial page went after the twin conflict of interest sagas of Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman and leading bipolar disorder researcher Fred Goodwin, conflicts that have been well-documented on this site as well. The...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 1, 2008 12:01 AM
This will be the only post today because it's pretty much getaway day and after doing this site for three years, I know that traffic craters today and tomorrow. I may be back on Friday, but maybe not. Thanks to...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 26, 2008 12:01 AM
There was quite a bit of media coverage of revelations yesterday that controversial Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, who is also at Massachusetts General Hospital and is the primary creator of the bipolar child paradigm and is one of the...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 25, 2008 12:28 AM
Gardiner Harris of the New York Times has done it again. In a piece just out on the paper's website, he details emails and other documents from an ongoing lawsuit against J&J over the use of its antipsychotic Risperdal in...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 24, 2008 11:00 AM
As I noted on Monday, an FDA committee of outside experts was set to review the use of the atypical antipsychotic Zyprexa in teens. The meeting, according to the New York Times, turned into quite the affair with doctors denouncing...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 19, 2008 12:03 AM
There's a reason for the Harvard bit in the headline: the Harvard ADHD/Bipolar Child--that would be child psychiatrists Tim Wilens and Joe Biederman, both objects of a Senate investigation into not properly disclosing their Big Pharma funding--are out with a...
Posted in Furious Seasons on October 10, 2008 12:03 AM
As most of you know, last week the FDA sent me what it's calling the official definition of pediatric bipolar disorder, at least to the degree that the agency will use the definition to approve drugs for the alleged disorder....
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 22, 2008 12:05 AM
I read the New York Times Sunday Magazine piece on alleged child bipolar disorder over the weekend. It wasn't quite as big a piece of crap as I heard from readers initially, but Jennifer Egan's article was, in my opinion,...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 15, 2008 12:03 AM
I'm very busy today with an outside project, but I wanted to pass along news that the New York Times Sunday Magazine has a major piece out (online now, runs on Sunday in the paper) on the bipolar child. I've...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 12, 2008 02:04 PM
Yesterday, I reported that the FDA's psychiatry products chief, Thomas Laughren, and the FDA itself were refusing to answer questions about pediatric bipolar disorder which the agency had two weeks previously determined unilaterally was a valid diagnosis. The FDA's move...
Posted in Furious Seasons on August 15, 2008 09:16 AM
Two weeks ago, the FDA announced that pediatric bipolar disorder--aka, child bipolar disorder, juvenile bipolar disorder, etc.--was a valid diagnosis, despite the fact that it doesn't exist in the DSM and child psychiatrists cannot even agree amongst themselves whether the...
Posted in Furious Seasons on August 14, 2008 12:03 AM
There was a recent op-ed in the Boston Globe by an emeritus Harvard med school professor criticizing the many financial conflicts of the group of child psychiatrists headed by Joseph Biederman. Among other things, he pounded on the meds given...
Posted in Furious Seasons on July 30, 2008 08:58 AM
I wasn't aware of Michael Merzenich's website before yesterday, but he popped up on my radar when he took a swing at the bipolar child paradigm. Merzenich is an emeritus professor of neuroscience at UCSF, is an expert on brain...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 20, 2008 12:03 AM
The Boston Globe had an interesting blog item yesterday pointing to a statement issued by Mass. General. In it, Peter Slavin, president of MGH, and David Torchiana, chairman and CEO of Partners Health Care, which is connected with MGH, defend...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 13, 2008 12:20 PM
A fascinating bit of research in JAMA came out yesterday in which researchers looked into whether there were benefits to treating kids diagnosed with ADHD with St. John's Wort as opposed to treating them with a placebo. The study involved...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 11, 2008 12:03 AM
Much credit to AHRP and Pharmalot for picking up an interesting bit on one the defenders of Harvard child psychiatrist Joe Biederman who was touted in Sunday's New York Times piece as "a true visionary in recognizing this illness in...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 10, 2008 07:53 AM
Some of you are aware that yesterday the New York Times had a front page article detailing multi million dollar payouts from pharmaceutical companies to Joe Biederman, Timothy Wilens and another Harvard/Massachusetts General psychiatrist. These researchers are the chief proponents...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 9, 2008 12:03 AM
The New York Times today has an article on revelations that Joe Biederman, the controversial Harvard child psychiatrist, did not fully report money he was receiving from pharma companies. He made well over $1 million in recent years doing research,...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 8, 2008 11:03 AM
So the Joe Biederman group at Harvard and Mass. General is at it again. Biederman is, of course, famous as the Harvard psychiatrist who is the chief propagator of the bipolar child child paradigm. In a study of adolescents with...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 4, 2008 12:01 AM
PBS' "Frontline" took on the controversies around the bipolar child paradigm and medicated children last night. I was at work and did not see the program, so I have no opinion of it. You can watch it online here. I'd...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 9, 2008 12:40 AM
Here's the first installment of my year-end wrap up. So much happened in mental health news this year that I broke it into two posts. 2007 was that busy of a year. The second one will be up tomorrow. January...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 26, 2007 03:38 PM
That's the question posed in an editorial on MSN UK, coming on the heels of recent news that kids with ADHD essentially turn out just fine over the long-term. I'm still not clear on what the implications of those studies...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 14, 2007 11:39 AM
In what's got to be a gigantic brain shake for many in the psych research world, the New York Times is reporting today on two studies involving kids with ADHD. Both studies will confound experts in the field who've long...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 13, 2007 11:00 AM
Fascinating piece in yesterday's Boston Globe about how the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is combing records from its state Medicaid program, plucking out all the kids on a certain unnamed antipsychotic (I assume it's Zyprexa) and the kids on more than...
Posted in Furious Seasons on October 8, 2007 12:05 AM
I just finished watching the "60 Minutes" piece on child bipolar disorder. It seemed to me to be about as level and as fair a handling of the controversial diagnosis as you could get out of television news. I still...
Posted in Furious Seasons on October 1, 2007 12:01 AM
Just a brief note to let you all know that CBS' "60 Minutes" will take on the case of Rebecca Riley this Sunday. Riley was a four-year-old who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and ADHD who was either drugged to...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 28, 2007 03:45 PM
As I noted earlier today, a new study of Zyprexa use in teens was just published. I've just reviewed the full paper and will have more thoughts in a bit. Until then, take a look at the disclosure statement for...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 27, 2007 11:23 AM
Late last night, a study touting the use of Zyprexa in teens aged 13 to 17 years with bipolar disorder hit the web. It's published in the October issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. The study was lead-authored by...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 27, 2007 12:33 AM
Last Friday afternoon, KUOW-FM, Seattle's NPR affiliate, did a program on the bipolar child controversy and the explosion in diagnoses of the disorder in children. The station's guest was Jon McClellan, medical director of the Child Study and Treatment Center...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 17, 2007 12:03 AM
Two days ago, the FDA approved the atypical antipsychotic for use in treating schizophrenia in children and teens aged 13 to 17 years old and in treating bipolar disorder in children and teens aged 10 to 17 years old. Several...
Posted in Furious Seasons on August 24, 2007 12:05 AM
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...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 28, 2007 12:03 AM
That this was coming. Robert Goldberg over at DrugWonks takes a one-iron out on Larry Diller and the Boston Globe for Diller's op-ed criticizing Joe Biederman and the Harvard bipolar child mafia. He asks if someone on the paper's edit...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 22, 2007 12:03 AM
I really don't know how else to describe this, but Lawrence Diller, a psychiatrist in Walnut Creek, California, has declared war on Joseph Biederman and the Harvard bipolar child mafia. Recently, he told an audience at a bipolar disorder conference...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 19, 2007 04:39 AM
Following up on my post of yesterday, here's a link to the Boston Globe's excellent piece on the Harvard bipolar child mafia and the controversy around the diagnosis and treatments. I'm a bit confused why one blogger deems this the...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 18, 2007 12:05 AM
Today's Boston Globe has an excellent article on the bipolar child controversy and the Harvard bipolar child mafia. One of that group's chief critics is a psychiatrist at the University of Washington right here in Rain City. I'll say more...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 17, 2007 11:36 AM
There was an interesting story last week in Psychiatric Times. It was a curtain raiser on what the reporter promises will be a big year of data for psych MDs. Lots of studies on using atypicals in kids and adolescents--I...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 24, 2007 12:01 AM