We’re talking Australia here (the stats for the States are probably worse); and the Australian media is beginning to wonder
1. why the country hasn’t been able to come up with prescription guidelines for this runaway train; and
2. why the committee of experts charged with this task has got in-hock-to-pharma folk on it.
Of course the underlying problem is that Australia is … a little slow. How long does it take for news to get there? We’ve known for years that Joseph Biederman’s research is compromised by his own pharma affiliations, but here comes the committee to announce that they’ve been unable to decide on the Australian guidelines because
US psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, whose work is cited over 80 times in the draft guidelines, and two colleagues were sanctioned by Harvard University after allegedly failing to report more than $1.6m they received from drug firms.
Uh… ye-e-e-s-s… Biederman’s conflicts of interest and non-disclosures and, er, “strong pro-drug views” have now gotten him into formal trouble. But Harvard took its sweet time. Everybody’s been scandalized by Biederman for ages. Where were you guys?
Meanwhile, millions of children down under get diagnosed with ADHD and have to take really strong drugs… I guess… Ho hum.
Response to the Disciplinary Committee
Say Biederman, Wilens, and Spencer:
“Ah hell, we just do what we can, sir.
You can’t avoid sleaze
When you’ve got our disease:
The absence of all moral sensors.”
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(UD thanks B. for the link.)
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Update:
“You could have made more nice statements about the drug.’’
More on the culture of academic psychiatry in the United States.
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Lest we forget.
… Biederman is a leading proponent of the off-label use of antipsychotic drugs to treat bipolar illness in children. His work is widely seen as contributing to an explosive growth in such prescriptions, and much of his support came from companies that benefited from his research.
… who cannot seem to keep their names out of the papers.
Their universities continue to praise them to the skies — see here, here, and here — and yet the New York Times and various United States senators and various university colleagues are constantly writing in very negative terms about these guys, sending them angry letters, suggesting they’re corrupt and destructive…
Biederman, Nemeroff, and Zdeblick aren’t the only controversial high-profile medical school professors in America; but no other professors have been so enduringly under attack – for conflict of interest, for suppression of negative evidence, for personal greed – by the media, professional organizations, and Congress. All three men, for years and years and years, have been accused of serious misbehavior. Their names are always in the papers, and always for the wrong reasons.
Zdeblick is -for the umpteenth time – in today’s headlines.
When does a university decide that a prominent, grants-getting, journal-editing, mover-shaker on its faculty has become so compromised that he or she should go? Emory University let Nemeroff go, but the University of Miami immediately panted after him, and has worshipfully adored him ever since… I mean, you have to wonder: Do the leaders of these universities even know they have a problem?
Kajoko Kifuji, a professor at Tufts, prescribed homicidal amounts of anti-psychotics to a child.
I mean, of course, she handed the prescriptions to the child’s parents – the child was only four at the time.
Kifuji had been giving her powerful drugs since she was two.
Rebecca Riley’s parents killed her (the mother has been convicted of second degree murder; the father’s trial begins soon) via doses of the multiple non-FDA-approved (for use in children) drugs Kifuji gave them.
Kifuji – who prescribed the same drugs to the parents’ other two children – based these prescriptions on what the mother told her about her children.
Kifuji testified that her diagnosis was primarily based on Carolyn Riley’s description of her daughter as aggressive and disruptive. She in 2004 prescribed Clonidine to Rebecca for ADHD; the next year, she prescribed Depakote to treat bipolar disorder.
Kifuji went on to approve a double dosage of the medication after Carolyn Riley told her that she was giving Rebecca twice the daily recommended amount.
That’s from the Tufts newspaper. Here’s Lawrence Diller with more detail:
Dr. Kifuji determined that Rebecca at age two had hyperactivity and began prescribing drugs to her at that time. Kifuji changed her diagnosis to bipolar disorder at age three. She also made the same diagnosis for Rebecca’s brother and sister who were nine and seven. All three were receiving variations of these sedating psychiatric medications. Kifuji, who was granted immunity against prosecution to gain her cooperation, testified during the trial that she relied almost exclusively on reports from Rebecca’s mother on the children’s aggressive behavior, sleep problems and history of mental illness in the family to make the diagnosis for the three children.
… [A] three year old was prescribed three psychiatric drugs for bipolar disorder…
… Joseph Biederman, head of Harvard’s Pediatric Psychopharmacology Clinic, has long espoused the bipolar diagnosis in children. He and his group have claimed the diagnosis can be made in children as young as two and should be followed by aggressive psychiatric drug interventions…
Once Kifuji’s finished with her busy court appearance schedule, she will be hiring lawyers to defend her against a malpractice suit from the estate of Rebecca Riley.
Tufts thinks she’s great. Happy to have on her board.
This memorable quotation from Springtime for Hitler serves nicely to introduce Harvard’s latest attempt to shut up its critics. UD‘s friend Bill sends her this link to a New York Times article. Excerpts:
Harvard Medical School is backing off a new student policy that would have restricted interaction with the news media after students complained it would chill their ability to talk about current issues in medicine, school officials said Tuesday.
… Nate Favini, a Harvard medical student and chairman of the Student Council Advisory Board, said in an e-mail message Tuesday: “Instead of limiting students, we should encourage bold thinking and allow them to advocate for the reforms that our health care system so badly needs.”
[The dean of students] did not deny that the policy was prompted in part by student remarks earlier this year about the influence of pharmaceutical companies on medical education.
… David Tian and Kirsten Austad, activist medical students at Harvard, said in an e-mail message Tuesday, “It is hard to imagine that this new policy is not somehow related to the past advocacy efforts of students. The reason we spoke out against conflicts of interest was to promote patient welfare as the primary concern of medicine, in the face of institutional practices that can harm patient care.”…
Half empty, half full kind of thing… Empty people protecting Joseph Biederman’s privileges… But, on the other hand, young people full of moral ferocity…
Usually the empty people win. Maybe this time they won’t.
As psychiatrists gather to enlarge the profession’s enormous diagnostic manual (bitterness, shyness, apathy, being online too much, having been traumatized in some way or other — all of these, and many more, are about to be billable), let’s consider once again the work of Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher who died a few days ago.
In a 1967 essay, “The Psychoanalytic Theory of Culture,” Kolakowski attacks what I’ll call psych-medicine (this term will cover the complex meld of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychotherapy).
Psych-medicine teaches, writes Kolakowski, that “the individual is organically incapable of self-understanding and can achieve it only with the aid of an analyst.” It “aims first and foremost at securing spiritual comfort, conditions of peace and forbearance, at protection from traumatic experiences, and, in particular, at removing … stresses.” The result, for the education of children, he continues, is disastrous: “An education thus planned leads them to expect that others will endlessly satisfy all their whims, thus exposing them to a considerably greater amount of frustration, trauma, and suffering in later life. [Psych-medicine] is effective, if one wants to deprive people of their sense of the responsibility for thinking about their own lives; it always recommends the path of least resistance, and it teaches one to be afraid of risk, chance, and competition. [Society] is [thus] exposed to the growing pressure of people who preserve the characteristics of capricious pre-school children – cowardly, selfish, and irresponsible.”
Kolakowski concludes: “A doctrine which teaches that we cannot truly be subjects is… discouraging – it teaches acquiescence in treating oneself and others as objects. And such acquiescence is what is helping to put civilization to sleep.”
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Why is the man of the American hour, maybe the man of the American century — to get at this point another way — Michael Jackson, a person who spent years scoring hospital-strength opioids so he didn’t have to exist?
Talk about putting civilization to sleep…
Half in love with easeful death?
The American dream is no longer to be Fuck-You Rich.
The dream is I’m-Dead-and-You’re-Not Rich.
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The ever-ramifying Diagnostic Manual is the bound meta-narrative of all the reasons we opiated ourselves.
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“I am only afraid,” wrote Goethe, “that the world will [eventually turn] into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else’s humane nurse.”
Not too sure, though, about the humane. This blog — and many other blogs — has followed the shocking inhumanity of psychiatrists who routinely give powerful drugs to three-year-olds.
“[G]iving major tranquilizers to children,” writes David Healy, “is little different from giving children cancer chemotherapy when they have a cold.”
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Anyway, can’t say Kolakowski didn’t warn us. Yet so sickening and out of our control is the situation that our only revenge is art, as Terrence Rafferty noted recently in the New York Times.
Decades ago, he points out, in talking about the portrayal of psych-medicine people in film (he could have added novels, like the postmodern classic Crying of Lot 49, whose character Dr Hilarius is a violently demented psychiatrist), psych-med people
were accorded a certain respect, as most doctors were: they were expected to perform miracles, and their patients were duly grateful. Not any more. Hollywood’s familiarity with psychiatrists — and our filmmakers are no strangers to the couch — has bred something more like contempt, to the point where a mumbling, depressive wreck like the hero of [the new film] “Shrink” seems more the norm than the exception.
Now the psychiatrists themselves — the mumbling depressive wreck is a wildly successful Los Angeles psychiatrist — number among the dead. Having helped put civilization to sleep, they’re self-sedating.
[The film’s psychiatrist is] pretty much permanently stoned on pot (sometimes enhanced with substantial quantities of alcohol). The blank stare he trains on his patients is not a therapeutic technique, a pose of studied indifference — it’s actual indifference. [His patients consider him] an eccentric genius, using his own emotional dishevelment and brazen boredom as a radical, innovative approach to the treatment of their neuroses.
Rafferty wonders about the many contemptuous representations of the contemporary psychiatrist.
… It’s tempting to speculate, at times, on filmmakers’ motives for treating psychiatrists so rudely, to suspect that there might be just the hint of a desire for revenge on the perpetrators of their own failed, ruinously expensive adventures in self-knowledge.
And again:
… You have to wonder, really, why psychiatrists come in for so much abuse in the movies these days. Is it merely a kind of natural resentment of people who presume to understand us?
This is Kolakowski’s point, isn’t it? Psych-medicine convinces us that “the individual is organically incapable of self-understanding and can achieve it only with the aid of an analyst.” Having created this dependency, having assured us that we cannot live an autonomous examined life, the profession both shows itself actually incapable of understanding us, and at the same time capable of drugging us out of the distress our epistemological misery prompts. Those drugs are where the money is. Andrew Scull quotes Healy:
With an ever-expanding array of problems being medicalized and added to psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, “diseases have all but become commodities and are as subject to fashions as other commodities, with the main determinant of the fashion cycle being the patent life of a drug”.
The shrink at the center of “Shrink” is really a kind of model for us, for his patients. Fuck the adventure of insight. It’ll make you sad and anxious, like Woody Allen. Just calm yourself.
In a move Harvard University should consider in connection with Joseph Biederman, Washington University has rid itself of a professor so deeply compromised in his research ethics as to do terrible damage to the school’s reputation as long as he remains on the faculty.
… [F]our former colleagues [accuse Kuklo of] falsifying research on a bone-growth product made by Medtronic that was used on severely injured soldiers. He was also accused of forging the other doctors’ signatures when he submitted a research report to a medical journal last year.
The Army, which investigated the matter, issued a report rebuking him. It took no further disciplinary action, Army officials said, because Dr. Kuklo is now retired from the military. But Walter Reed notified Washington University of its findings five months ago.
The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, a British publication, retracted Dr. Kuklo’s article in March after receiving a report of the investigation from the Army. But the episode largely escaped public notice until last week.
This week, a Republican senator, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, sent letters seeking more information about Dr. Kuklo from Walter Reed, Washington University, two medical journals and Medtronic.
Dr. Kuklo has been a consultant to Medtronic…
Kuklo’s silence in the face of all of this has been as total as the silence of the pretend soldiers he enlisted in his study. He won’t talk to anyone. UD guesses he refused to talk to Washington University too, and that this persuaded the university of his guilt – or at least so pissed it off that it booted him out.
… a powerful writer, gets to the core of a complex situation. This is from today’s San Francisco Chronicle:
… Virtually all researchers say they are not influenced by drug company money. Doctors rarely out-and-out lie about their research, but spin influences how a study is set up, its statistical analysis and interpretation. Research on drug studies repeatedly shows that drug trial results are tilted toward a positive description of the drug’s effects when the research is funded by a drug company rather than the government or an independent agency.
Big Pharma money is most powerful when promoting [Joseph] Biederman‘s research and point of view over competing models. Drug companies copy and mail his important papers on psychiatric drugs to every American physician working with children. A member of the Biederman team is at every important meeting on children’s psychiatric issues and medical education. Their presence, and often the conference, itself, are supported by drug industry dollars.
Only when children die or side effects are severe – as in the FDA hearings on children and antidepressants in 2004, and in the recent publicity over obesity and diabetes caused by the bipolar drugs – do opposing viewpoints get the country’s eyes and ears.
Biederman’s conflict of interest problems have exposed his strong pro-drug views to the public for scrutiny. Until now, fear of the Biederman team has operated quietly on the small club of child psychiatric researchers. Only when 2-year-olds started taking three psychiatric drugs simultaneously under a Biederman protocol for bipolar disorder did the emperor’s clothes become so invisible as to begin the naming of names…
Two-year-olds on three drugs simultaneously. Jesus.
… of God.
Everyone’s picking up on Joseph Biederman’s statement in a recent deposition that the rank after full professor is God.
Everyone’s dumping on him because he’s so arrogant as to have said that.
But while there’s every reason to abhor Biederman for his perversion of science, I’m not sure this lame attempt at humor merits the attention it’s gotten. Like a lot of people who end up in courtrooms and Grassley Letters, Biederman’s a twisted character for sure. The fact that he can be sophomoric under pressure, though, seems to UD neither here nor there.
Unfortunately for him, it’s an easy sound bite to sink your teeth into.