thelastpsychiatrist.com - Academics Hide Drug Company Payments. Adnotated.
And with good reason.
An article in The Independent asserts Dr. Joseph Biederman, Harvard guru of ADHD and child bipolari, received over $1M in consultant fees and didn't report it to Harvard;ii it then implies this is why kids are overmedicated, etc.
Wrong. A thousand times wrong. It could not be more wrong, it is dangerously wrong.
Believe me, I am no friend of Biederman's. But the money is a red herring. If you want to be angry about the specific ethics of a psychiatrist receiving Pharma money, fine, but I am telling you it is not worth the Senate time, not worth press space.
The real money, the real problem that goes unmentioned is the money that goes to universitiesiii, in the form of research grants. Biederman may have pocketed $1M, but I'm sure he was awarded much, much more for clinical trials -- money which he didn't get any of, which went to Harvard.
We aren't overmedicating kids because Biederman told us to; we're doing it because Harvard told us to. And Harvard told us to because that is what they are getting money to study.iv Biederman is just the nanobot that does it.
If Biederman never existed, nothing would be different. You read his resume, you think, wow, he's a big player. You don't realize that if he didn't exist there would be some other person in his exact position, who would also have become a Distinguished Professor, won awards, written 450 publications, etc. The machine was already in place, his slot was going to get filled; his mind didn't discover anything, those results were coming no matter what, those publications were already going to be written.v
The money isn't corrupting him into thinking childhood bipolar is underdiagnosed -- he truly believes it. The reason he believes it is his entire professional existence -- his whole identity -- is predicated on believing it. He's not a scientist, he's a priest.
He starts out as a young academic. He lands a spot in a research group that studies X, so he studies X, later he branches out into X+Y, or goes to Z, etc, eventually he finds himself a niche. And he believes in that niche, he believes in his data, no matter what it says. You can't convince him he's wrong because it isn't science and it isn't even a bias -- it's identity.
That's how an entire nation of psychiatrists could have been deluded into prescribing Depakote for maintenance when the data itself says not to do it. It's belief, not money, "we believe bipolar is a kindled disorder..." Hell, if Harvard believes it, what chance do the rest of us have?
What he doesn't see because he is too small to see it is that that niche exists only because there is grant money for it. That's the real bias. He internalizes an artificial system because it gives him identity and identity is more important than money.
It's not just Pharma -- NIH is worse. If NIMH wants to study the biological causes for childhood bipolar, then we will all agree that these causes exist "we just haven't found them yet." But if NIMH decides to study the social causes of childhood bipolar, then those causes exist, and the biological ones don't. The question is how does NIMH decide what to study? Culture. When a culture decides to study something, the results don't matter -- the decision to study it affirms it a priori.vi
Do you think that all those psychoanalysts from 1899-1974 were all retarded? No understanding of biology, a bunch of clowns, morons? They were brilliant, but that was the time, that was the culture, no matter what data you had to the contrary you were still going to be wrong and they right. Get it? People blame psychoanalysis, but the specific problem is paradigms, which are agreed upon because they have serve some other purpose -- not science, not truth -- and change only when that other purpose disappears, or the paradigm fails it.
If we just want to punish a few high ranking psychiatrists -- and for what? hiding money from Harvard so it doesn't take a 20% cut? -- it will do nothing to stop the anti-humanism zamboni that's trying tovii smooth out all the kinks in society.
Data are irrelevant, here's the paradigm: child bipolar is underdiagnosed because society needs it to be.
There is still massive wealth inequality, racism, resentment, unrealistic expectations of life and a gross sense of entitlement -- in short, narcisissm -- that we have no solutions for except to hastily pathologize it all and hand it to the psychiatrists. They can keep us all confused for a decade or two until we have another world war, discover cold fusion, or the aliens come.
The problem isn't that money influenced Biederman; the problem is that even money won't be able to influence him.viii
Do you know why Biederman hid the money from Harvard? Because he can't believe he's being paid so much money for something he would have done for free. Until you change that groupthink, that blind faith, nothing else will change.
———- If this isn't child abuse, what is ? [↩]
- Harvard wanted a cut, is the entirety of the problem, like any street pimp with a disloyal whore Harvard's pissed off, and set the goons out to put the word on the street. [↩]
- By which he means, hedge funds masquerading as universities. What, you thought harvard's a university ? Wrong ; could not be more wrong ; dangerously wrong.
Harvard's a scam, scamming everyone out of everything. It scams impressionable youths (while putting out no nookie!) out of their post-tax, pre-interest earnings ; then it turns around and, on the basis of having managed to scam a really choice pile of idiots, scams more idiots out of their life's work, because no, this Biederman moron wasn't sitting around one day thinking "how could I get myself in a position of sexually molesting children ?!". He was contrariwise, sitting around, like any "optionality" wanker, wondering "how could I matter in the world" when Harvard came to him and said, "hey, wanna abuse some children for us ? we'll pretend like you matter in the world if you do". And so Biederman... well... what could he do ? Besides, not like they were asking him to finger little girl twats or anything like that.
But you see... they're way the fuck more "advanced" (= perverse) than that. They didn't want him to feed the poor kids a steady diet of wonderbread, baloney, Helman's mayo etcetera with no alternatives, either. That's more advanced child abuse, it's true, because the misfortunate child so abused will carry on his body the scars of childhood mistreatment her entire life. Fingering leaves no traces, you don't even have to wash it off, whereas the extra inch of height you lost out on through parental sex abuse in the form of wrong diet is perfectly indelible, take as many showers as you want it'll still be there with you until the day you die. But... pretty much every parent already does that, and Harvard has to stand out, it can't simply fuck over children in obvious, or common ways. It has to come up with something special, and boy howdy has it!
Then Harvard turns around, and on the basis of having scammed all these idiots of the two different kinds, pretends to be a university. Because, their logic goes, "education is sexual abuse", which of course it is, and the chumps it captured are in fact sexually abusing each other (nevermind that while all education is sexual abuse, not all sexual abuse is education, typical "error" of the scammer), and so... who could accuse them of not being an University ?
Me, that's who. Scamming a bunch of retards into sexually abusing each other while you steal one set's money and the others set's life&work dun make any of these sad chumpatrons pompously calling themselves "Harvard" or "Princeton" or "Stanford" or "MIT" etcetera anything more, or anything besides. [↩]
- Not quite, seeing how Harvard owns the nominally "private" corporations doing the production (aka, Gossnab), through the usual process of that "ownership" in socialism. The simplest way to think of the "Ivy League" loose confederation of chumpatrons would be in the terms of Gosplan, which is precisely what they are. [↩]
- Yet another Ballas gem of shimmering perfection. Yes, exactly so, the man gets it. [↩]
- Recall the whole
One can't fault the FDA for striking a balance between safety and efficacy. They voted nearly unanimously "Yes" on its monotherapy efficacy in GAD and MDD-- they agreed it worked; but they didn't want it being used as commonly as Prozac, so voted unanimously "No" on safety. So no monotherapy approval.
Now re-read that, in context if you wish, and then explain to me : why does the paragraph start with "one can't fault" ? What does the author want to be true ?
Yes, he knows what he's talking about, "you can't convince him he's wrong because it isn't science and it isn't even a bias -- it's identity." ; yes identity is more important than anything. For whom ? [↩]
- And for what ?
To make the life of future zambonis easier ? Tyvm, but... [↩]
- Quite exactly ; there he sits, that dumb cocksucker like ten million other dumb cocksuckers just like him, waiting to "give the opportunity". [↩]
