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Table Of Contents
About ADHD
ADHD Facts
Targeting Children
Childhood Behavior Redefined
Throwing Learning into Disorder
Debunking the Diabetes Analogy
It’s Not All in the Genes
Brain Scan Scam
Brain Science: We think, suspect, suggest, perhaps…
About ADHD
Retrieved from https://www.cchr.org/
Despite claims of irrefutable science, there are absolutely no objective criteria by which Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) can be confirmed to exist. This is not science.
Nor is there any scientific evidence proving that a chemical imbalance in the brain is responsible for the symptoms attributed to ADHD, or that ADHD is a “brain-based disease.” Yet this is repeatedly claimed as fact by psychiatrists.
In fact, the diagnostic criteria to determine if a child has ADHD were voted on in committee by members of the American Psychiatric Association, by a show of hands. There are many reasons why a child might be displaying behavioral or educational problems. Drugging only masks the real cause.
ADHD Facts
Retrieved from https://www.cchr.org/index.cfm/9144/9126
“If there is no valid test for ADHD, no data proving ADHD is a brain dysfunction, no long-term studies of the drugs’ effects, and if the drugs do not improve academic performance or social skills and the drugs can cause compulsive and mood disorders and can lead to illicit drug use, why in the world are millions of children, teenagers and adults…being labeled with ADHD and prescribed these drugs?”
Dr. Mary Ann Block
Author, No More ADHD
The information provided here has been drawn from many sources and is only a fraction of the available knowledge. Armed with even this limited information, the ADHD controversy will be far less confusing and dangerous for parents, and certainly more predictable.
For all of psychiatry’s pretensions to being a science, the ADHD scientific “discovery” process was literally a vote by a show of hands at an American Psychiatric Association (APA) Committee meeting in 1987. After it was inserted into the American Psychiatric Association’s billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), within one year, 500,000 American children were diagnosed as ADHD sufferers. Despite the total lack of objective proof of its existence, millions of children have been harmed through the use of this diagnosis. Today in the U.S., over 6 million children are taking mind-altering drugs because of no more than an “expert’s” fancied ADHD opinion.
In the 1990s in the U.S., federal government incentives helped increase the number of children diagnosed with “ADHD”: low-income parents whose children were diagnosed with “ADHD” were given more than $450 a month. In 1991, U.S. federal education grants also provided schools with $400 in annual grant money for each child diagnosed with “ADHD.” The number of children diagnosed with this “disorder” soared again. By 1997, the number of children labeled as having “ADHD” had risen alarmingly to 4.4 million. Today, the figure is closer to 6 million.
ADHD is actually a stigmatizing psychiatric label. Once labeled, your child is considered to have a psychiatric disorder, in fact to be mentally ill or diseased (euphemistically expressed as mentally disordered). This label can negatively affect a child’s and others’ perceptions of himself/herself, both now and in the future. For example, children diagnosed with “ADHD” and prescribed stimulants could later be ineligible to serve in the armed forces. In 1998, the U.S. military discharged more than 3,100 recruits with psychiatric histories, pointing to a rise in “medication” and treatment of ADHD and other “behavioral disorders” as a reason for discharge.
In 1998, Florida child psychiatrist Dennis Donovan said, “ADD is a bogus diagnosis. Parents and teachers are rushing like lemmings to identify a pathology….Our current pathologizing of behavior leads to massive swelling of the ranks of the diseased, the dysfunctional, the disordered and the disabled.”
According to Beverly Eakman, author of Cloning of the American Mind, “These drugs make children more manageable, not necessarily better. ADHD is a phenomenon, not a ‘brain disease.’ Because the diagnosis of ADHD is fraudulent, it doesn’t matter whether a drug ‘works.’ Children are being forced to take a drug that is stronger than cocaine for a disease that is yet to be proven.”
Dr. Joe Kosterich, Federal Chairman of the General Practitioners’ branch of the Australian Medical Association, said, “The diagnosis of ADD is entirely subjective….There is no test. It is just down to interpretation. Maybe a child blurts out in class or doesn’t sit still. The lines between an ADD sufferer and a healthy exuberant kid can be very blurred.”
In March 1998, James Swanson of the U.S. National Institute for Mental Health, and one of the foremost proponents of ADHD as a disease, addressed a meeting of the American Society of Adolescent Psychiatry, admitting: “I would like to have an objective diagnosis for the disorder [ADHD]. Right now psychiatric diagnosis is completely subjective….We would like to have biological tests—a dream of psychiatry for many years.” Simply put, a child is mentally ill with ADHD if a psychiatrist thinkshe/she is, or is of that opinion.
In his book, Ritalin Nation, Richard DeGrandpre, Ph.D., states, “One study, reported in the journal Pediatrics, found that 80% of the children thought to be hyperactive, according to home and school reports, showed ‘exemplary behavior and no sign of hyperactivity in the office.’ This finding is consistent with numerous studies showing, and dozens of newspaper articles reporting, considerable disagreement among parents, teachers, and clinicians about who qualifies for a diagnosis. This can only raise questions about the existence of ADD as a real medical phenomenon since it is these symptoms alone that are the basis of the diagnosis.”
Speaking at the 1998 National Institutes of Health Conference on ADHD, William B. Carey of the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, concluded, “What is now most often described as ADHD in the United States appears to be a set of normal behavioral variations….This discrepancy leaves the validity of the construct [of ADHD as a ‘disease’] in doubt….”
Targeting Children
Retrieved from https://www.cchr.org/index.cfm/9328
“All children exhibit ADHD-like behavior. Observe children right before recess, or riding on a bus heading to an exciting field trip, or anticipating a birthday party. Nothing short of strapping them down can keep them still. Healthy children have verve—a zest for life that is exhibited in curiosity, excitement, enthusiasm, animation, vigor, and imagination.”
Ty C. Colbert, Ph.D.
Clinical Psychologist
Author, Rape of the Soul
The defenseless innocence of children has failed to soften psychiatry’s quest for profit, and failed completely to inspire them to assess the validity, safety or consequences of their “diagnoses,” Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or “Learning Disorder.” Psychiatrists have no idea what “causes” them; little wonder then that there are no objective, scientific criteria to confirm such “disorders” even exist.
Kevin P. Dwyer, assistant executive director at the National Association of School Psychologists in the U.S., admitted that the way “learning disorders” are diagnosed is “not a science.” “We’re not sophisticated enough to do a perfect diagnosis,” he candidly admitted.
Nevertheless, a huge and entrenched psychiatric treatment and research empire has mushroomed around ADHD. That empire demands and consumes billions of dollars each year and has turned schools into mental health clinics, and mentally and physically hooked millions of normal children on mind-altering drugs.
Today, American schools spend a combined $1 billion a year on psychologists who work full-time to diagnose students. Annually, $15 billion has been spent in the U.S. on the diagnosis, treatment and study of psychiatry’s so-called “disorders.”
Childhood Behavior Redefined
Retrieved from https://www.cchr.org/index.cfm/9339
“…In its recent infatuation with symptomatic, push-button remedies, psychiatry has lost its way not only intellectually but spiritually and morally. Even when it is not actually doing damage to the people it is supposed to help,…it is encouraging among doctors and patients alike the fraudulent and dangerous fantasy that life’s every passing ‘symptom’ can be clinically diagnosed and, once diagnosed, alleviated if not eliminated by pharmacological intervention.”
Paul R. McHugh
Professor of Psychiatry
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), symptoms of ADHD include:
Hyperactivity includes:
Impulsivity includes:
Throwing Learning Into Disorder
Retrieved from https://www.cchr.org/index.cfm/9350
“In schools throughout the nation, children who are having problems with their academic work, their peers, their teachers, or their families are being labeled by the users of DSM as suffering from disorders that carry labels like Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Conduct Disorder, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. These children may be placed in special classes, dismissed from school, or given medication. From prisons to child welfare agencies, DSM is shaping how we think about problems and determining who gets labeled as having a mental disorder.”
Professors Herb Kutchins & Stuart A. Kirk Authors, Making Us Crazy, and DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and The Creation of Mental Disorders
In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association published its first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), containing a list of 112 mental disorders. DSM-II, published in 1968, consisted of 163 disorders.
In 1980, the third edition, DSM-III, added 112 disorders, bringing the total to 224. Under the lucrative heading of “Infancy, Childhood, and Adolescence,” 32 new mental disorders were added, including:
Dr. Fred A. Baughman, Jr., has discovered and described real diseases. Finding no abnormality—no sign of disease—in children said to have ADD/ADHD and “learning disabilities,” he writes of them as “inventions, contrivances and fraud.”
Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, says, “The conventional definition of child psychiatry is that it is a medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental diseases that afflict children. From a sociological viewpoint, child psychiatry is a secular institution for regulating domestic relations. From my point of view, it is a form of child abuse.”
Debunking the Diabetes Analogy
Retrieved from https://www.cchr.org/index.cfm/9361
“Let me clear this up right now. ADHD is not like diabetes and [the stimulant used for it] is not like insulin. Diabetes is a real medical condition that can be objectively diagnosed. ADHD is an invented label with no objective, valid means of identification. Insulin is a natural hormone produced by the body and it is essential for life. [This stimulant] is a chemically derived amphetamine-like drug that is not necessary for life. Diabetes is an insulin deficiency. Attention and behavioral problems are not a [stimulant] deficiency.”
Dr. Mary Ann Block
Author, No More ADHD
Psychiatrists deceitfully argue that ADHD requires “medication” in the same way that diabetes requires insulin treatment; they further argue that to deny children such “medication” would be like denying insulin to a diabetic. The analogy is psychiatry-serving and false.
Psychiatric drugs do not treat mental disorders in the same way as insulin treats diabetes. “What is implied in this statement is that psychotherapeutic drugs correct known chemical deficiencies (or excesses, or other instances), in the same way that insulin does. This analogy is repeated over and over again, not only in promotional material… and in articles published in professional journals, but, judging from reports from patients, every day in offices of psychiatrists and other physicians,” wrote Elliot Valenstein, Ph.D., biopsychologist and author of Blaming the Brain.
Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, a clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, says that doctors tell patients they need to take a serotonin booster “like a diabetic takes insulin.” But “even in diabetes, when something is known about the physiology, only about 10% of patients have conditions severe enough to require insulin. For the rest, their less severe diabetes can often be managed with milder agents, diet, and lifestyle changes. What if doctors tried to make all diabetics dependent on insulin?”
It’s Not All In the Genes
Retrieved from https://www.cchr.org/index.cfm/9393
While genetic studies appear to be “the mythical guise of pure science and objective knowledge about nature,” they turn out “underneath, to be political, economic, and social ideology.”
Richard Lewontin
Harvard Professor
Author, Biology as Ideology
ADHD and mental problems are not inherited. They are not based on your genes or how your brain works. They are not a physical disease. You can’t look at them under a microscope or by using a brain scan or x-ray.
Harvard professor Richard Lewontin, author of Biology as Ideology,says, “The fact is, not a single study of personality traits in human populations successfully disentangles similarity because of shared family experience and similarity because of genes….”
David Kaiser, a practicing psychiatrist in Chicago and affiliated with Northwestern University Hospital, states, “…modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness….”
Brain Scan Scam
Retrieved from https://www.cchr.org/index.cfm/9372
“…[T]he search for a biological marker is doomed from the outset because of the contradictions and ambiguities of the diagnostic construct of ADHD as defined by the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). I liken the efforts to discover a marker to the search for the Holy Grail.”
Lawrence Diller, M.D.
University of California,
San Francisco
While “brain scans” purportedly show brain differences in the brains of “ADHD” children or sufferers of other mental ills, Dr. Fred Baughman, Jr. says the drugs the person has already taken probably caused the changes that appear to be in the brain. All drugs, whether cocaine, heroin or a psychiatric drug are brain altering.
A study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in September 2001 noted that although gross differences in size or symmetry of brain structures can be quantified with neuroimaging, individual cells and cell layers cannot yet be visualized. This means that, although the volume and shape of brain structures may be determined, the underlying cause of any differences cannot.
In other words, brain scan pictures are knowingly and fraudulently used by mental health experts to sell the idea of scientific evidence, and therefore justification, for the diagnosis of an ADHD disease or disorder.
Brain Science: We think, suspect, suggest, perhaps…
Retrieved from https://www.cchr.org/index.cfm/9144/9377
“There is no biological marker for ADHD,” according to a study in the January 1, 2000 edition of the Journal of Learning Disabilities. In simple terms, this means there is no proof; of course, a bogus diagnosis will never provide any proof, regardless of how many research billions are consumed in searching for it.
While we are told “ADHD is associated with abnormalities in the brain” and is caused by an “interplay between genetic and environmental factors,” a review of supporting studies reveals a generous use of words like “suggests,” “suspect,” “believe,” “may,” “could,” “think,” “probably,” and “perhaps.” Indeed, the claims are no more than speculative theories. Even the U.S. National Institutes of Health stated, after its 1998 hearing on ADHD, that “although research has suggested a central nervous system basis for ADHD, further research is necessary to firmly establish ADHD as a brain disorder.” [Emphasis added]