"You sound like Tom Cruise" a child psychiatrist told me after a lecture. I wished he had said that I looked like Tom Cruise, but oh well.... Since then, I've continued to talk to medical audiences, and with my patients, about what I think are some underappreciated risks with amphetamine stimulants. As a new blog writer, I knew I could not avoid writing about this topic too though I hoped to delay the moment. It didn't take long.

Another mainstream article makes the press about corrupt doctors taking pharmaceutical industry money. The June 8 New York Times reported on a US Senate investigation into poor disclosure of millions of dollars in income provided by pharmaceutical companies to Harvard child psychiatry researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Like Dr. Peter Kramer ("In Practice" blog), I too have carefully followed the work of the MGH research group, both for their research on childhood bipolar disorder (with which I agree in large part) and their research on ADHD in adults (with with I disagree in general). Regarding treatment, my own experience and research has tended to be opposite to theirs: I have found amphetamine stimulants (especially methylphenidate) and antipsychotics to be less effective and more harmful than they have reported. Has their optimism about medications been biased by their profits? Perhaps; perhaps not. There are plenty of profits to go around, and just as much can be made these days bashing medications as marketing them.

I have not known National Public Radio (NPR) to closely follow the annual meetings of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Maybe I just missed it, but I haven't noticed Carl Kasell roaming around the 15 conventions I've attended. Hence my surprise to hear a report on May 6, 2008 entitled "Study: Doctors overdiagnosing bipolar disorder."

In my late twenties, when I was a psychiatry resident with little time to spare, I volunteered to canvass my Cambridge, Massachusetts neighborhood for Ted Kennedy's 1994 re-election campaign. He had no primary opposition, but he needed enough signatures to be put on the ballot. I thought I could make a small contribution, and an easy one: after all, who in Cambridge would refuse to sign a form so Kennedy's name could be on the ballot? A lot of folks, to my surprise -