Frontline's "The Medicated Child"

If you didn't catch last night's show on PBS's Frontline, you can watch it in its entirety here. I spent two hours being interviewed in a very hot hotel room at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge (back in August), and I got about 20 seconds of snippet-fame on the show. Not much, but I was glad to have had the chance to participate in a small way.

Some thoughts:
--Overall, great show: it was intelligent, balanced, and didn't oversimplify.
--Child psychiatrists came across rather poorly. One particularly cringe-worthy scene involved Dr. Bacon listening to the parent's worries about medications after Rebecca Riley's death, and then, without skipping a beat, offering to add Xanax and upping the dose of Trileptal. Poor form, expecially after he was quoted saying that prescribing drugs was an exercise in "experimenting."
--Nonetheless, Kiki Chang was an excellent stand-in for Dr. Biederman. He came across as extremely intelligent, progressive, and concerned. But does he really think that he can diagnose future bipolar disorder by getting a teenager to say that his thoughts race?
--David Shaffer, chief of child psychiatry at Columbia, spoke wisely about the over-reliance on medication in children. His wisdom, combined with his British accent, made it pretty much impossible not to believe everything he had to say.