There’s been a lot of news lately involving child psychiatry. As noted by others, the Supreme Court may grant cert in the case of Pittman v. South Carolina which has the interesting twist that the defendant, age 12 at the time of the crime, was taking antidepressants when he killed his grandparents. Yet, as I mentioned the link between antidepressants and violence is tenuous at best.
On the heels of the Pittman case, comes this weeks Frontline program which explored the explosive growth of children being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Unlike ADHD, bipolar disorder is generally treated with antipsychotic medications which can have profound and lasting side-effects. Yet, the desire to place the blame at the foot of the pharmaceutical industry is misplaced; the psychiatric community has a long tradition of capturing behaviors within their diagnostic net and transforming them into pathologies. All of the pharmaceuticals in the world do nothing to our children without a mental health culture which favors medicine as the first line of treatment for troubled children. And that mental health culture is not just a product of myopic physicians or Big Pharma, but very much one of our own creation.