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'Boston Legal' cites investigation of real-life Harvard psychiatrist

E-mail|Link|Comments (0) Posted by Elizabeth Cooney October 29, 2008 05:26 PM

"Boston Legal" ripped a headline from its fictional backyard this week when its TV lawyer went on a tear about a real, if unnamed, Harvard psychiatrist being investigated by a Senate committee for his ties to drugs companies.

Pharmalot blogger Ed Silverman helpfully quotes Candice Bergen's character Shirley Schmidt:

"A famed Harvard psychiatrist helped fuel the recent boom in antipsychotics for kids. Turns out he personally took over $1.6 million from drugmakers over the past seven years," she says to a jury. "He also failed to report this income to the university, by the way. How can this be?"

Dr. Joseph Biederman of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital is widely regarded as influential in the rise in bipolar diagnoses among children. US Senator Charles E. Grassley has investigated Biederman and two of his colleagues for not disclosing all the payments they received from companies that made the medications they researched and recommended.

Harvard declined comment on a fictional TV show.

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Elizabeth Cooney is a former health reporter for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, where she also was a business reporter and an editor. Earlier in her career, she edited medical books and journals at Little, Brown, and worked for Boston magazine.