A reader passed along an article that ran last October in the MetroWest Daily News in Massachusetts, an article I'd not seen previously about the implementation of Yolanda's Law, named for a 16-year-old who committed suicide. "The legislation, signed by...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 24, 2009 12:03 AM
A grand jury in Massachusetts has not returned a criminal indictment against Kayoko Kifuji, a Tufts Medical Center psychiatrist, in connection with the doctor's role in the death of Rebecca Riley, a 4-year-old girl who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder...
Posted in Furious Seasons on July 1, 2009 02:45 PM
This article in the Topeka Capital-Journal and what it describes are disgusting, so I'll summarize: parents named tk and tk have a young 3-year-old daughter in Council Grove, Kansas, named Destiny. The parents are former drug addicts and both are...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 8, 2009 12:01 AM
The Wall Street Journal is out with a good piece today revealing that antipsychotic use among kids is still going up but that the rate of increase slowed somewhat last year. The paper attributes this to increased attention to the...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 18, 2009 12:01 AM
Many of you are already aware of the awful case of a 7-year-old boy in Florida named Gabriel Myers who last month hanged himself in the shower of his foster home. The kid was chock-full of psych meds--Symbyax, Vyvanase and...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 12, 2009 01:18 PM
This little brief was out recently in The Onion and I thought I'd pass it along for whomever might get a chuckle out of it. "A new study published in The Journal Of Pediatric Medicine found that a shocking 98...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 31, 2009 12:22 PM
There's no more controversial case in the mental health world than that of the 2006 death of 4-year-old Rebecca Riley, a Massachusetts girl who was diagnosed with alleged child bipolar disorder at the age of 2 and was put on...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 6, 2009 09:34 AM
News is just out this morning that the parents of Rebecca Riley, a four-year-old diagnosed with alleged child bipolar disorder and ADHD who died in December 2006, are to have first-degree murder charges reinstated against them, after a ruling by...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 23, 2009 10:28 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
Paul Rubin, an economist at Emory University, had a very weird op-ed published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution the other day. In it, he decried attacks upon psych researchers and their conflicts of interest wherein the docs take money from...
Posted in Furious Seasons on October 30, 2008 08:28 AM
The parents of Rebecca Riley, the four-year-old Massachusetts girl diagnosed with ADHD and alleged child bipolar disorder who died in 2006 from an overdose of psych meds, have sued the psychiatrist who made the diagnoses and wrote prescriptions for the...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 4, 2008 09:21 AM
Yesterday, the New York Times embarrassed itself by running an article on John McCain in which he was accused of having an affair with and doling out favors for a female lobbyist. I happened to read the piece when it...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 22, 2008 12:07 AM
First, thanks to all of you for your kind thoughts regarding my six-month anniversary of being off-meds. I happened to put the same post up on Daily Kos and got several fascinating replies, including this one from Paul Minot, a...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 22, 2008 01:04 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
The State of Massachusetts is embarking on what strikes me as an excessive social experiment. As of Jan. 1 annual checkups for about 500,000 kids and teens on the state's Medicaid program will have to include a mental health screening,...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 2, 2008 12:44 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
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
The "60 Minutes" piece on bipolar disorder in children and the Rebecca Riley case continues to generate responses, including one by John McManamy, whom most of you know authored a book on living well with bipolar disorder and depression. McManamy...
Posted in Furious Seasons on October 3, 2007 12:03 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
This is just startling: In recent years, hundreds of prescriptions have been written for anti-depressants in young children in New Zealand. Almost 5,000 anti-depressant prescriptions were written for children under 10 in 2004/05, but the figure dropped to 2,425 in...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 10, 2007 11:46 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
A source of mine informed me yesterday that CBS' long-running news program is both doing a piece on the controversy around the bipolar child paradigm and was recently in the Seattle area talking with experts in the field who are...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 14, 2007 12:07 AM
As I noted on Tuesday, a new study claims that 4.5 percent of the American population has bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder in this study is understood as BP-I, BP-2 and subthreshold bipolar disorder. SBD, as I am calling it, doesn't...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 11, 2007 12:48 AM
So my back is keeping me off the computer again, but I wanted to pass along the following bit that CBS' "The Early Show" did on kiddos with bipolar disorder. It's in two parts on the web at least. Includes...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 4, 2007 12:29 AM
As I guessed last week, the Cho story will be with us for a while because it is chock full of implications and will be a whipping boy for ideologues of every stripe for months to come. Much as the...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 25, 2007 12:03 AM
I read Jerome Groopman's April 9 article on the early-onset bipolar disorder controversy over the weekend. For those of you not in the journalism world, Groopman is an official big shot. He has an endowed chair at Harvard Medical School...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 9, 2007 12:05 AM
Halle Berry talks of a near-suicide attempt. Proof once again that love makes people do crazy shit. (Via The Blemish.) Epix Phamraceuticals begins a trial of an experimental anti-depressant. Says the company, "We believe there is a significant unmet need...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 29, 2007 11:00 AM
Back when news of Rebecca Riley's death and its circumstances first surfaced in early February, I had a hunch that the story would get a lot of attention--and it has--and I sensed that battle lines would develop in the mental...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 29, 2007 12:03 AM
The case of Rebecca Riley, a Boston-area four-year-old who died in December due to an overdose of psych meds, keeps getting weirder and weirder. Not that it wasn't already. Riley was diagnosed with ADHD at two-years-old and, later, with bipolar...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 28, 2007 12:11 AM
I've banged on the AP--an organization I generally hold in high esteem--for its lame coverage of mental health issues. My, my, my how things change when a child is killed under bizarre circumstances. I refer to the Rebecca Riley case,...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 23, 2007 12:33 PM
Most of you know that I am opposed to giving psych meds to children except under extreme circumstances (autism is one, psychosis is another). No, this isn't a post about the bipolar child paradigm. It's something else. It's about questions,...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 22, 2007 12:11 AM
Somehow, I missed John McManamy's blog post a couple of weeks back on early-onset bipolar disorder or juvenile bipolar disorder or whatever the hell we are going to end up calling it, aside from a failed a social experiment, when...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 19, 2007 03:17 AM
I'm happy to report that B., whom I wrote about last week, has found new housing. It's a building that already has a couple of other Vietnam-era veterans with mental illness living in it, so B. should be OK. More...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 13, 2007 12:01 AM
Defense attorneys for the parents of Rebecca Riley argued in court yesterday that there was no way the parents had enough medication on hand to have overdosed their daughter, aged 4, who died in December in Hull, Mass. She was...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 6, 2007 11:35 AM
As I noted yesterday, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) last week requested that Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca provide the House's Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which Waxman chairs, with a slew of documents relating to the companies' research, testing and marketing...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 6, 2007 12:32 AM
A post from earlier this month on the Bipolar Child paradigm has generated an interesting exchange between a staffer for the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation--who's speaking for herself, but being honest about her affiliation, which I appreciate--and a long-time...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 26, 2007 08:54 AM
I completely forgot that today's is President's Day, so my planned uber post for today is officially off until tomorrow. In the meantime, a source tipped me to a couple of books to help the bipolar children recognize their bipolarness....
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 19, 2007 09:53 AM
First, I want to thank readers for being incredibly kind to me this week--not that you haven't been before! But the last couple of weeks have been quite the test. So, thanks. I also wanted to pass along some links...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 16, 2007 01:24 PM
WBUR-FM in Boston, the city's main NPR station, today took up the question of bipolar disorder in kids. Appearing on the program was Janet Wozniak, director of the Pediatric Bipolar Program at Massachusetts General Hospital (i.e., Harvard), who defends the...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 15, 2007 11:43 AM
The New York Times has an article on the death, murder, unintentional over-dosing or whatever it turns out to be of four-year-old Rebecca Riley. Reporter Ben Carey smartly uses it as a wedge to talk about the debate within psychiatry...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 15, 2007 12:05 AM
The Boston-area media continues to pound on the murder of Rebecca Riley, a four-year-old who'd been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and ADHD and was overdosed on an ADHD drug. Her parents stand accused of murder, her psychiatrist has temporarily stopped...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 12, 2007 11:35 AM
There's more news out of Boston on the bipolar child murdered sadness I wrote about the other day. Rebecca Riley was her name. She was four-years-old and was found dead last December. Her parents stand charged with her murder, allegedly...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 8, 2007 12:03 AM