Joseph Biederman

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

Awards and Honors
Dr. 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 CHADD “Hall of Fame”.

In 2007, Dr. 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 Dr. Biederman at #1 in terms of total citations to his papers published on ADD/ADHD in the past decade.

Dr. 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, Dr. 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 in September.

Noteworthy work
Described as "one of the world's most influential child psychiatrists", Biederman has published hundred of papers on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and ranks as one of the most-cited researchers on the subject. In a 2005 interview, Dr. Beiderman stated: "Our work is also expanding to the study of early temperamental antecedents to ADHD in young preschool offspring of parents with ADHD."

Biederman has also led studies concluding that a substantial minority of children diagnosed with ADHD actually had pediatric bipolar disorder. This theory was proposed at a time when it was unheard for young children to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which is characterized by severe mood swings. According to the New York Times, between 1994 to 2003, there was a controversial 40-fold increase in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder. .

Although Dr. Biederman was one of the first to systematically study childhood onset bipolar disorder, the existence of bipolar disorder in childhood had been shown by many prior reports. In 1986, Weller et. al. searched the literature of case reports describing children with severe psychiatric symptoms. Of 157 such cases, 24% had childhood onset bipolar disorder. This review suggested that juvenile mania may be common among referred children with severe psychopathology but that it may be difficult to diagnose.

This early work led to systematic studies by Dr. Biederman and others which showed that childhood onset bipolar disorder was more common than originally believed, especially among children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or conduct disorder. Childhood onset bipolar disorder is now recognized by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry as a valid disorder as indicated by the publication of a practice parameter for diagnosing and treating bipolar disorder in children ..

Criticism
In 2008, Congressional investigators charged that Biederman had received $1.6 million from drug companies between 2000 and 2007, much of which was not reported to university officials. This was reported by Gardiner Harris of the New York Times in an article that Dr. Goldberg describes as “the McCarthyite Mugging of Joe Biederman” due to its use of innuendo and inaccurate information.