Mental disorders are very serious ailments, and the prevalence of true positives is high enough to warrant a lot of funding into research and intervention.
However, there is agreement among a lot of scientists and clinicians that there is a shocking amount of false positives, people who are overdiagnosed and receive treatment nonetheless. It is also agreed that pharmaceutical companies are not innocent when it comes to creating demands for new drugs.
Now, I know very little about bipolar disorders, but the following paper by Dr Healy makes a lot of sense to me:
Healy, D. (2006). The latest mania: selling bipolar disorder. PLoS medicine, 3(4), e185. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0030185
“What might once have been thought of as sober institutions, such as Massachusetts General Hospital, have run trials of Risperdal and Zyprexa on children with a mean age of four years old [34,35]. Massachusetts General Hospital in fact recruited trial participants by running its own television adverts featuring clinicians and parents alerting parents to the fact that diffi cult and aggressive behavior in children aged four and up might stem from bipolar disorder.”
See also: articles I wrote on drug fraud in the last 3 months (1, 2, 3).
(thank you for pusblishing open access, Dr Healy!)