I urge you to read one psychiatrist’s opinion of the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation. Preying on Human Misery points out that the organization has had to distance itself from its reliance on funding from pharmaceutical companies due to the growing public outcry over the use of off-label drugs for children. To me, this organization is right up there with NAMI, with parents willing to label their children as brain diseased rather than to look into their own family dysfunction as a possible recourse.
I met another psychiatrist in the audience who told me about the existence of a website, bpkids.org, which is the homepage of an organization called the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation (CABF). He said the organization was primarily funded by the drug companies, and featured messageboards with advice from parents of allegedly bipolar children on what other parents should tell and not tell their doctors in order to get their child labeled with the disorder. The drug companies also used the website to recruit subjects for ongoing clinical trials of drugs for pediatric bipolar disorder, thereby assuring that the subjects in their clinical trials were only those whose parents were anxious to have their child so labeled.
I’ve been suspicious of the CABF since the beginning of the century.