Jon Rappoport’s Demons

This new disease reminded Frances of one of his keenest regrets about the DSM-IV: its role, as he perceives it, in the epidemic of bipolar diagnoses in children over the past decade. Shortly after the book came out, doctors began to declare children bipolar even if they had never had a manic episode and were too young to have shown the pattern of mood change associated with the disease. Within a dozen years, bipolar diagnoses among children had increased 40-fold. Many of these kids were put on antipsychotic drugs, whose effects on the developing brain are poorly understood but which are known to cause obesity and diabetes. In 2007, a series of investigative reports revealed that an influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar disorder in kids, the Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, failed to disclose money he’d received from Johnson and Johnson, makers of Risperdal.

via Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness | WIRED.

This is the real reason that Frances said what he did and got quoted by Jon Rappoport: DSM-IV is inadvertantly responsible for the epidemic of bipolar disorder in children.  He doesn’t mention Joseph Biederman, who took money from Johnson and Johnson to push Risperdal on “deviant” children.   In 2011, Dr. Biederman was disciplined for not reporting $1.6 million in “consulting fees” from J+J as well as $700K given to a research institute he headed which in part studied Risperdal.   He is still Chief of the Clinical and Research Programs in Pediatric Psychopharmacology and Adult ADHD at the Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.