Babies and Bathwater

Florida, July 2026: “The State Surgeon General recommends against the use of psychotropic drugs in children for treatment of mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, or attention-deficit related disorders.”

How to respond to such statements? The answer is accurate assessment, without over- or under-treating mental illness, working toward providing the best evidence-based biopsychosocial care that we can. Otherwise, we will have no answer for those like the Florida SG, and we will lose babies whose access to effective help is tossed out with the dirty bathwater of sloppy clinical care.

This issue of CCPR focuses on bipolar disorder and reflects our efforts to refine and preserve good care. At first glance, these topics might appear to undermine the core of our work: overdiagnosis of bipolar disorder in US youth, use of non-pharmacologic approaches, deprescribing medications, and working with parents.

Read them, then tell me what you think.

Joshua D. Feder, MD

jfeder@thecarlatreport.com