Please contact the FDA and help our children

Philip at Furious Seasons has been pressing the FDA hard on it’s preposterous and presumptuous claims that pediatric bipolar disorder is a legitimate diagnosis when, in fact, it is not even contained in the DSM IV. (The fact that I believe the DSM IV is a load of crap has no place here.)

Please read Philip’s post here.  Follow the links in the body of his post for history.

Then do what he suggests here:

To help correct this misapprehension, I think the FDA needs to hear from all of you who read this post. It doesn’t matter whether you are pro-meds, anti-meds, a true believer that kids are psychiatrically ill at birth or that they are victims of bad environments explained by other DSM diagnoses–we all have a stake in having the FDA explain what pediatric bipolar disorder is, how it’s measured, what its symptoms are, what its episodic duration is and so on. Otherwise, we run the risk of what Psych Central has dubbed diagnosis by government decree. Since when has the government been in the business of dreaming up psychiatric diagnoses?

The public information officer for the FDA’s psychiatry products division is Sandy Walsh. You can shoot her an email at sandy.walsh@fda.hhs.gov. Tell her that the agency needs to answer legitimate questions about the diagnosis. Be polite, please. And thanks for your help.

Perhaps, we can all get some answers.

Thanks!