{"id":112942,"date":"2018-06-20T12:00:47","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T11:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=112942"},"modified":"2018-06-19T11:27:50","modified_gmt":"2018-06-19T10:27:50","slug":"psychiatric-drugs-for-kids-a-big-pharma-revenue-stream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/06\/psychiatric-drugs-for-kids-a-big-pharma-revenue-stream\/","title":{"rendered":"Psychiatric Drugs for Kids\u2014A Big Pharma Revenue Stream"},"content":{"rendered":"

11 Jun 2018 – <\/em>How did the once modest medical specialty of child psychiatry become the aggressive \u201cpediatric psychopharmacology\u201d we see today? Millions of children<\/a> who were once just considered too active are now diagnosed with ADHD, conduct disorders, oppositional defiant disorder, mixed manias, obsessive-compulsive disorders, pervasive development disorders, irritability, aggression and personality disorders and given drugs. Children who were once considered shy or moody are now diagnosed with depression, bipolar disorder, mood disorders, social phobia, anxiety, borderline disorders, assorted \u201cspectrum\u201d disorders and even schizophrenia.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>How extreme has the diagnosis of psychiatric illness in children become? In his book Psychiatryland<\/a>, psychiatrist Phillip Sinaikin recounts reading a scientific article in which it was debated whether a three-year-old girl who ran out in traffic had oppositional-defiant disorder or bipolar disorder. Instead of just being defiant, she might have bipolar disorder which is marked by \u201cgrandiose delusions\u201d that she was special and cars could not harm her said the article.<\/p>\n

Everyone but the children wins at the pediatric psychopharmacology game that puts children on expensive psychiatric drugs\u2014Pharma, Wall Street, doctors, insurers, pharmacy benefits managers and Pharma\u2019s PR and ghostwriting firms. Researchers, medical centers, clinical research organizations and medical journals also profit through Pharma funding. The only losers at the pediatric psychopharmacology are kids themselves given a probable life sentence of expensive and dangerous drugs. They are denied the chance to grow up normally and outgrow what are likely minor problems or traits.<\/p>\n

Like elderly in nursing homes, children do not make their own medication decisions, what makes them desirable targets for drug marketers.<\/p>\n

Few children who are started on psychiatric drugs at a young age graduate to a point where their doctors, parents and teachers pronounce them fine and they are drug-free. Instead they are often given additional psychiatric drugs, which become cocktails, when more \u201csymptoms\u201d occur. The symptoms are usually attributed to the alleged psychiatric illness not drug side effects and considered \u201cproof\u201d of the illness. Needless to say, it often will never be known if the child ever needed psychiatric drugs in the first place.<\/p>\n

Nor is Pharma content with life-long customers started as children. It also operates \u201cprescribe early\u201d campaigns so that parents put their children on drugs even sooner<\/em> than they might.<\/p>\n

One \u201cprescribe early\u201d campaign for the atypical antipsychotic Risperdal, given to children, uses a macabre abandoned wallet, teddy bear and keys lying on a barren street to imply that a child died because she wasn\u2019t given psychiatric drugs soon enough. The ads \u201creposition a drug that was being used too late to achieve its maximum bene\ufb01ts,\u201d said its advertising<\/a> agency, Torre Lazur McCann. Benefits for whom we might ask?<\/p>\n

Drug marketers are also not above using childhood icons. Brand managers for Seroquel, an antipsychotic that competes with Risperdal, considered creating Winnie-the-Pooh characters like Tigger (bipolar) and Eeyore (depressed) to sell Seroquel, according to published reports, at an AstraZeneca sales meeting. Parents say they have seen toys emblazoned with Seroquel logos.<\/p>\n

The father of \u201cpediatric psychopharmacology\u201d is considered Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman credited with ballooning the diagnosis of \u201cbipolar disorder\u201d in children by as much as 40 fold. In 2008, Biederman was investigated<\/a> by Congress for allegedly accepting Pharma money he didn\u2019t disclose and he agreed to suspend his industry-related activities.<\/p>\n

Biederman headed the Johnson & Johnson Center for the Study of Pediatric Psychopathology at Massachusetts General Hospital whose stated goal<\/a> was to \u201cmove forward the commercial goals of J. & J.\u201d The center netted a cool $700,000 in one year of operation, according to reports.<\/p>\n

Biederman remains<\/a> at Harvard where he is Chief, Clinical and Research Programs in Pediatric Psychopharmacology and Adult ADHD.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/p>\n

Martha Rosenberg is a freelance journalist and the author of the highly acclaimed \u201cBorn With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health,\u201d published by Prometheus Books. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 entrepidreport.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Millions of children who were once just considered too active are now diagnosed with ADHD, conduct disorders, oppositional defiant disorder, mixed manias, obsessive-compulsive disorders, pervasive development disorders, irritability, aggression and personality disorders and given drugs. Children who were once considered shy or moody are now diagnosed with depression, bipolar disorder, mood disorders, social phobia, anxiety, borderline disorders, assorted \u201cspectrum\u201d disorders and even schizophrenia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":42267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}