Richard A. Friedman

Richard Alan Friedman, M.D. is professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, attending psychiatrist at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital and director of Psychopharmacology at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. He is expert in the pharmacologic treatment of personality, mood and anxiety disorders, obsessive–compulsive disorder, PTSD and refractory depression.

Career

Friedman gained his B.A. in 1978 from Duke University, and his M.D. in 1982 from Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He has been at Weill Cornell Medical College from 1996 to the present.

Research

Friedman has authored publications in the American Journal of Psychiatry, The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, among others.

As of 2014, Friedman's research activity is in the field of chronic depression: evaluating antidepressant medications; studying the effectiveness of long-term treatment; neurobiology; and the social and occupational impairments. He is conducting a clinical study of medication for "double depression" (dysthymia with major depression), and evaluating the role of serotonin in chronic depression. He plans a study simultaneously examining brain activity with MRI, behavior, and serotonin functions in patients with chronic depression.

Journalism

Friedman is a frequent guest columnist in the Science Times section of The New York Times. Since the spring of 2015, Friedman has been a contributing op-ed writer at The New York Times. In 2011 he contributed to The New York Review of Books.

Overall Richard A. Friedman’s article “A Natural Fix for A.D.H.D.” included some false information but also some accurate information. He did not properly cite any of his claims, which makes a reader skeptical of the article’s conclusions. The article correctly attributes the lack of enjoyment from daily activities to a lacking novelty-seeking trait and the article correctly explained the lack of dopamine in ADHD individuals in the reward pathways. The article bases its suggested treatment plan off of the stories of two individuals. Compared to the study mentioned before, done by Biederman et al., which looked at 500 individuals and it shows the effectiveness of stimulants as a treatment for ADHD. This piece of information is more generalizable than information taken from only two patients. The article favors lifestyle changes, which is a valid opinion, but it is not supported well. Friedman did an adequate job at informing his readers on the science of ADHD accurately. He could have used more sources as well as citing his sources properly would have made his article more powerful.

Personal life

In 2014 the Financial Times reported that Friedman had been practicing Transcendental Meditation for three years. He was quoted as saying, "I am less reactive to small things that would have bothered and upset me in the past. ... I’m more easygoing."