Joseph Biederman

Joseph L. Biederman
Medical career
Institutions	Massachusetts General Hospital Harvard Medical School

Joseph L. Biederman is Chief of the Clinical and Research Programs in Pediatric Psychopharmacology and Adult ADHD at the Massachusetts General Hospital, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Biederman is Board Certified in General and Child Psychiatry.

Awards and honors

Biederman received the American Psychiatric Association’s Blanche Ittelson Award for Excellence in Child Psychiatric Research, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s Charlotte Norbert Rieger Award for Scientific Achievement. He has been inducted into the Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD) "Hall of Fame."

Biederman was the recipient of the 1998 NAMI Exemplary Psychiatrist award. He was also selected by the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society Awards committee as the recipient of the 2007 Outstanding Psychiatrist Award for Research. In 2007, Biederman received the Excellence in Research Award from the New England Council of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He was also awarded the Mentorship Award from the Department of Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Conflict of interest investigations

In 2008 Senator Chuck Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee undertook a three year Congressional Investigation that found that Joseph Biederman, M.D., Timothy Wilens, M.D., and Thomas Spencer, M.D., well-known university psychiatrists, who had promoted psychoactive drugs, had violated federal, Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital regulations by secretly receiving large sums of money from the pharmaceutical companies which made the drugs. Biederman and Wilens "were leading investigators and advocates for the diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder in children and adolescents." Biederman earned consulting fees of at least $1.6 million over eight years from pharmaceutical companies, but did not report much of this income to university officials. Johnson & Johnson gave more than $700,000 to a research center that was headed by Biederman from 2002 to 2005, and some of its research was about Risperdal, the company's antipsychotic drug. Biederman responded saying that the money did not influence him and that he did not promote a specific diagnosis or treatment. In 2011, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School disciplined Biederman, Wilens and Spencer for violating conflict of interest polices.

In her article published in the New York Review of Books in 2009, Dr. Marcia Angell, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, cited Biederman as an example of physicians who use "drugs that have already been approved for a particular purpose for any other purpose they choose" without any basis in "good published scientific evidence." She argued that "Biederman’s own studies of the drugs he advocates to treat childhood bipolar disorder were so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive." By 2009,

"Thanks largely to [Dr. Biederman] children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose, and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age."

— Dr. Marcia Angell

In a widely-cited multiple-author study published in 2007 in the Archives of General Psychiatry, Moreno's team noted the rapid increase in the diagnosis of youth bipolar disorder in office-based medical settings between 1994-1995 and 2002-2003. They argued that their findings highlighted the "need for clinical epidemiological reliability studies to determine the accuracy of clinical diagnoses of child and adolescent bipolar disorder in community practice." This represented a "fortyfold increase" from 1994 to 2003 in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children and a corresponding "rapid rise in the use of powerful, risky and expensive antipsychotic medicines in children." In his 2008 article on Senator Grassley's investigation, New York Times journalist Harris Gardiner revealed that Biederman's "work helped to fuel" this dramatic increase.

"Although many of his studies are small and often financed by drug makers, Dr. Biederman has had a vast influence on the field largely because of his position at one of the most prestigious medical institutions."

— Harris Gardiner, New York Times 2008

In 2007, Biederman was ranked as the second highest producer of high-impact papers in psychiatry overall throughout the world with 235 papers cited a total of 7048 times over the past 10 years as determined by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The same organization ranked Biederman at #1 in terms of total citations to his papers published on ADD/ADHD in the past decade.

See also

• Medical ethics