(Article changed on February 18, 2013 at 12:06)
by Martha Rosenberg and Evelyn Pringle
Part one appears here click here
No drug ads or Pharma sponsors dot the website
of the Child & Adolescent Bipolar Foundation which has renamed itself the
Zen-like "Balanced Mind Foundation." (Meditation/medication--same
idea, right?) Instead, visitors to the site will find slick slide shows, tales
of children saved by bipolar drugs and a list of donor families. But according
to the Journal of the American Academy of
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry the actual guidelines the Balanced Mind
Foundation uses to discern bipolar disorder in children and adolescents were funded by Abbott,
AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Forest, Janssen, Novartis and Pfizer. Oops.
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the group
that produces the journal, is also viewed
as a possible Pharma front organization.
Its journal is where Paxil's "study
329," which buried the suicide risks of the antidepressant in adolescents
leading to wide use, appeared. Court proceedings brought by the New York
Attorney General in 2004 revealed the research was not even written by the 22 doctors and
researchers listed but by the marketing firm of GlaxoSmithKline who makes
Paxil, Scientific Therapeutics Information. What?
"You did a superb job with this," wrote the
paper's first so-called author, Brown University's Martin Keller to Scientific
Therapeutics Information's ghostwriter Sally Laden. "It is excellent.
Enclosed are rather minor changes from me."
Authors of the Journal of the
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry's influential
2007 drug guidelines for very
young children--"this will sometimes involve the use of medications,"
they presell--also had Pharma ties. Financial links were disclosed to Abbott,
AstraZeneca, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cephalon, Eli Lilly,
Forest Labs, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), several divisions of Johnson & Johnson,
and ten other drug companies. In 2012 alone the Academy received $221,000 from Eli Lilly for
research, an "outreach program" and a conference reception.
Children are forced by school personnel to take their drugs," says former
drug rep Gwen Olsen, author of Confessions
of a Drug Pusher. "They are forced by their parents to take their drugs,
and they are forced by their doctors to take their drugs. So, children are the
ideal patient-type because they represent refilled prescription compliance and "longevity.'"
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