On the extraordinary venality of academic psychiatry
UD has posted a longer cut from a recent Times Literary Supplement article about David Healy.
What particularly arouses Healy’s ire is the manufacture of bipolar disorder among infants. Cocktails of drugs are given to children as young as one or two. Diagnostic criteria are relaxed to allow more and more children into the mix. Foundations are established for parents of such children to assemble and lobby on behalf of fixing the alleged biochemical imbalances that produce their children’s misbehaviour. Stories of epidemics of teenage depression are planted in the mass media. Rating scales are manipulated, and used to demonstrate that the pills have behavioural effects – something it is difficult not to demonstrate. Meantime, the sequestering of data allows a situation where the published scientific literature is all too often at odds with what the scientific data themselves would show, were they actually allowed into the public arena.
Full disclosure: My late uncle was an extraordinary psychiatrist who specialized in the treatment of adolescents. He would be heartsick over these developments.