Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12713

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Publication type: news

Rosenberg M.
Big Pharma's Push to Drug Children: Dr. David Healy Interview
The Epoch Times 2008 Jan 16
http://en.epochtimes.com/news/8-1-16/64187.html

Full text:

David Healy, M.D., is a professor in the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine, Cardiff University, in Bangor, Wales, U.K.

Interviewer: In “The Creation of Psychopharmacology,” “The Antidepressant Era,” “Let Them Eat Prozac,” and your medical journal articles, you have suggested a profit motive for the doctors and academics who promote psychiatric “diseases du jour,” such as panic disorder and social anxiety.

But in your paper in the current issue of International Journal of Risk & Safety In Medicine you suggest that disease by proxy might also be involved. [Editor’s note: The paper referred to is “Pediatric Bipolar Disorder: An Object of Study in the Creation of an Illness,” written with Joanna Le Noury, also in the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine at Cardiff University in Bangor.]

Dr. Healy: Yes, in the case of pediatric bipolar disorder, clinicians are making this escalating diagnosis not on the basis of visible signs they see in patients, tests, or what patients tell them, but rather on the basis of what third parties such as parents and teachers tell them-without consideration of the range of influences that might trigger these remarks.

And, given the fact that there is no evidence the drugs being prescribed are beneficial and a lot of evidence that they can cause difficulties for these minors, one might ask if we are not witnessing a variant of Munchausen’s syndrome, wherein significant others derive some benefit from someone else being ill.

Interviewer: A lot has been written about the pharmaceutical industry’s disease mongering, which you define as promoting remedies or nostrums that benefit the seller more than the patient with the putative disease. But what else is driving the wave of child psychiatric diagnoses we are witnessing?

Dr. Healy: There are many factors involved. As a society, we have lost our tolerance for variation and differences among children. When I was growing up, if a child were slow in learning to walk or in other development, it was accepted.

Now, we are so oriented toward testing and norms, checks, and rating scales, that deviations are medicalized and pathologized. We have become so much more competitive and worried about performance that parents are afraid their child won’t be able to compete in the modern world.

We have also become a lot more nuclear than we used to be. There used to be grandma or great aunt Helen living at home, who would have a generational perspective and could say about troublesome childhood behavior, “Oh his dad was the same way. He’ll be fine.” Now parents lack an extended family’s support and perspective when they receive negative remarks from schools or day-care centers about their kids.

It is not a coincidence that pharmaceutical companies consider grandparents a barrier to getting children on psychoactive drugs.

Interviewer: Before it was called bipolar disorder, manic-depressive illness used to be said to occur in only 10 people per million. Now it’s said to affect 5 percent of North American adults-16.5 million-and an untold number of children. Is this more disease mongering?

Dr. Healy: Even though bipolar disorder was always thought to rarely have its onset before adolescence, which many still believe, it is now the rage. Just as the term “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors” was clever and sold products, though the drugs were not really selective, “mood stabilizers” have been aggressively marketed to treat bipolar disorder even though the term is misleading.

No drugs have been shown to offer prophylaxis against bipolar disorder-to stabilize mood-except lithium.

Pediatric bipolar disorder is now so entrenched as a catch-all diagnosis, it is cited by women who say the baby kicked too much in utero, sonographers who can’t get a good picture of a baby’s face, and obstetricians who can’t sample amniotic fluid.

I address the mania for diagnosing bipolar disorder in a book from Yale Press due out this spring.