Conflicts of Interest in Child Psychiatry

Child psychiatry is one of the most difficult and questionable spheres in psychology. On the one hand, specialists should do their best in order to treat a child and help him or her grow up to be productive members of society. If there is a little hope for recovery after taking definite pills or getting a child an opportunity to suffer less from the illness, it should be used. On the other side, it is often hard to foresee the side effect and long term risks of medications that are prescribed to children, since no one family will allow making experiments on their children. What is more, pharmacy is a profit-making business that is why many pharmaceutical companies forget about their main goal (to cure people) in the quest for money. In our work we will analyze the article “Child psychiatry is sick with hidden conflicts of interest” by Dr. Leonard Sax (2008) who is against the treatment of children with drugs and convicts that psychiatric specialists are in conspiracy with pharmaceutical companies.First of all, Dr. Leonard Sax mentioned three awful facts about the agreements between drug companies and famous psychologists who had a great influence on pediatricians and family doctors. For example, Dr. Joseph Biederman, the chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Massachusetts General Hospital was accused of getting more $1.6 million from the pharmaceutical companies in order to push their drugs for treating children’s ADHD and bipolar disorder. He really tried to convince pediatricians that they had to give children pills of these companies. As a result, the use of drugs for treating ADHD and bipolar disorder has been increased. Then, Dr. Fred Goodwin was blamed that he was paid $1.3 million by pharmaceutical companies for promoting the safety of powerful psychiatric medications for children when he was a director of the National Institute for Mental Health and headed the NPR program "The Infinite Mind." Finally, Dr. Charles Nemeroff who was a chairman of the psychiatry department at Emory University got $2.8 million in payoffs from drug companies between 2000 and 2007. Then, Dr. Leonard Sax calls readers to try to change the situation. In order to prevent the continuous conspiracy between doctors and drug companies, Dr. Leonard Sax suggests following the experience of The Cleveland Clinic that has introduced the rule to expose the ties between doctors and pharmaceutical industry by showing these facts online for doctors who get more than $5,000 per year from the drug companies. However, I believe it is not enough, since in any case there would be situations when some doctors would continue dealing with drug industry secretly. In my opinion, the government should redouble the punishment for doctors’ conspiracy with drug companies. Moreover, it is important to increase the inspection of incomes of doctors who promote any medications and take part in medical investigations. Besides, it is necessary to introduce the system of rechecking information about medical investigations. The side-effects and the benefit of each new drug should be …