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Section/ADHD
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Submission to the Council of Europe Inquiry into Psychotropic Drug Usage
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has a more than 30-year history of investigating and reforming abuses in the mental health field. Its experience in documenting the over-prescription of psychiatric drugs to children, the subsequent harmful effects of these drugs and the underlying problem of psychiatry’s diagnoses is broadly recognized. It has produced reports and publications on this important issue and, in 1998, testified before the U.S. National Institutes of Health “Consensus Conference on the Diagnosis and Treatment of ADHD” (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).
Submission to the Council of Europe Inquiry into Psychotropic Drug Usage
By: The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International
“Children have the right to protection from the use of narcotic and psychotropic drugs.”
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
Executive Summary
Introduction:
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has a more than 30-year history of investigating and reforming abuses in the mental health field. Its experience in documenting the over-prescription of psychiatric drugs to children, the subsequent harmful effects of these drugs and the underlying problem of psychiatry’s diagnoses is broadly recognized. It has produced reports and publications on this important issue and, in 1998, testified before the U.S. National Institutes of Health “Consensus Conference on the Diagnosis and Treatment of ADHD” (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).
This conference gathered medical testimony in an effort to determine if there was a legitimate scientific basis for ADHD. All other claims aside, they were forced to conclude, “We don’t have an independent, valid test for ADHD; there are no data to indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction...and finally after years of clinical research and experience with ADHD, our knowledge about the cause or causes of ADHD remains speculative.”1 Indeed, the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) admits that after spending $558 million in research, no causes for mental illnesses have been established.2
The truth is that it cannot be scientifically proven that any child suffers from ADHD or a learning “disorder,” yet they supposedly affect thousands of European children.
The bottom line is that informed consent in relation to diagnosis of “ADHD” or “Hyperkinetic Disorder” (HKD) and the treatment of these in children throughout Europe is being violated.
Informed Consent generally includes communicating the “nature and purpose of a proposed treatment or procedure; the risks and benefits” of such treatments and the alternatives “regardless of their cost or the extent to which the treatment options are covered by health insurance.” In relation to parental permission and assent in pediatric practice, “…the patient has the freedom to choose among the medical alternatives without coercion or manipulation.”
1) As the foreword to the Pompidou Group report on “Attention Deficit/Hyperkinetic Disorders: Their Diagnosis and Treatment With Stimulants” report states, there are “extreme differences of opinion between the psychiatric community and the general public” about ADHD. However, there are extreme diverse and conflicting medical and psychiatric opinions about the existence of ADD/ADHD/HKD, which parents are not informed about and should be.
2) While ADHD proponents state that “it has been shown that ADHD is associated with abnormalities in the brain"3 and that “evidence suggests” ADHD is caused by an “interplay between genetic and environmental factors,”4 review of such studies reveals words such as, “suggests,” “suspect,” “believe,” “may,” “could,” “think,” “probably,” and “perhaps.” Indeed, the claims remain theories. Even the U.S. National Institutes of Health after its 1998 hearing on ADHD, stated that “although research has suggested a central nervous system basis for ADHD, further research is necessary to firmly establish ADHD as a brain disorder.”5 [Emphasis added]
3) Significant evidence shows that children labeled with “ADHD” may suffer from nothing more than a nutritional deficiency or allergic/toxic reaction to pesticides, lead and heavy metal, or other factors. According to a California doctor, Mark Filidei, the symptoms of lead poisoning are “strikingly similar to several psychiatric ‘diseases’ [and] can exhibit...learning disorders, hyperactivity, aggressive or disruptive behaviour.” Indeed, a significant problem is that during medical training, doctors, then psychiatrists, are not trained in nutritional/orthomolecular or homeopathic medicine. As Dr. Mary Ann Block, author of No More ADHD wrote, “Although first year medical students learn about the physiology of how the body works, the real learning emphasis for the rest of their training is on naming a disease and prescribing a drug…When the focus of the medical school’s basic science and clinical faculty is on drugs, the medical training will also focus on drugs.”6
4) If a child is not learning or is behind in school, can’t seem to concentrate, or simply doesn’t enjoy his classes, a competent tutor who gets results can correct this. The child may also be highly intelligent and bored with the class.
Therefore, it is discriminatory and violates informed consent to present the child and his/her parents with information about and access only to chemical and behavioural treatments, without equal access to non-chemical treatment and educational solutions for these alleged conditions.
There are children who need special care, who are troubled. What that “care” is or should be is the point of contention. Our organization is not “anti-medicine” as some psychiatrists would have people think. On the contrary, CCHR comprises many doctors as members and advisors. While we do not give medical advice, we recommend that anyone having mental trouble seek the assistance of a medical doctor and undergo a competent and thorough physical examination to determine what underlying, undiagnosed physical complaints could be manifesting as “psychiatric” symptoms.
As a human rights body, we are instinctively opposed to those who abuse their power or who harm the innocent and weak, especially in the name of help. This is too often the case in the field of mental health.
This does not mean that serious mental difficulties do not exist, that people’s hopes and dreams cannot be shattered or that their methods of coping with this cannot fail. But it does mean that the situation regarding “ADHD/HKD” has been exaggerated and falsified at the expense of not only taxpayers and governments, but also children’s lives.
In this submission, we shall also highlight the problem of using drugs for children and young people, drawing also on our documented evidence of the American situation—where 6 million children are being shamefully drugged—and showing how Europe is in danger of paralleling the American experience. While America consumes 90% of the international supply of stimulant drugs for ADHD, according to the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) report for 2000, other countries with the highest consumption levels of stimulants (amphetamine and methylphenidate) in 1999 included Iceland, followed by the Netherlands, Switzerland, Israel, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Norway and Germany.
Finally, in 1996, Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D., an award-winning author and speaker on learning and human development, pointed out that 80% of children “don’t appear to be ADD when in the physician’s office. They also seem to behave normally in other unfamiliar settings where there is a one-to-one interaction with an adult.... Second, they appear to be indistinguishable from so-called normals when they are in classrooms or other learning environments where children can choose their own learning activities and pace themselves through those experiences. Third, they seem to perform quite normally when they are paid to do specific activities designed to assess attention. Fourth, and perhaps most significant, children labeled ADD behave and attend quite normally when they are involved in activities that interest them, that are novel in some way, or that involve high levels of stimulation.”
We will show that biological/behavioral psychiatry is far too quick to diagnose children as ADHD/HKD without even considering other sources of inattention and behavioral problems that can be addressed without a drug or behavioral control methods.
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Submission
No one can disagree that the health, welfare and safety of children are priorities for any country. As more and more children and adolescents are turning to the streets and to crime, violence and drugs, government policies concerning children are of paramount concern.
Empowered by the authority of the Council of Europe, its seal of approval for biological psychiatry’s diagnostic and treatment methods of children could easily create the impression that this system is working and that it is our best, most expert and most enlightened solution.
However, with more than 30 years experience, CCHR’s observations and conclusions, which are shared by a growing number of others, including doctors and psychologists internationally, are in stark contrast to the picture which has been presented by the Working Party of the Pompidou Group.
There is no scientific evidence to support a genetic or disease basis for “ADHD/HKD” nor that it is a “chemical imbalance in the brain.”
ADHD/HKD Fails the Science Test
“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.”
Beverly Eakman, Author, President U.S. National Education Consortium 2001
Science is the systematically arranged knowledge of the material world which has been gathered in a four-step process: 1) observation of phenomena; 2) collection of data; 3) creation of a hypothesis or theory by inductive reasoning and 4) testing of the hypothesis by repeated observation and controlled experiments. And it should be workable and invariably right for the body of knowledge in which it operates.
Boston University lecturer and author Margaret A. Hagen, Ph.D., writes: “The findings discovered through observation in one laboratory must be replicable in another laboratory. Data measured and gathered by one instrument must be the same as data gathered by another similar instrument. And thus the objectivity comes not from an individual practitioner but from a system that demands consistent and repeatable results.”
Dr. Thomas Szasz, internationally acclaimed author and Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, says that the designation “disease” can only be justified when the cause can be related to a demonstrable anatomical lesion, infection, or some other physiological defect.
Do psychiatric diagnoses of childhood behaviour pass the test? The answer is categorically no.
Dr. Hagen is emphatic: “Given their farcical ‘empirical’ procedures for arriving at new disorders with their associated symptoms lists, where does the American Psychiatric Association get off claiming a scientific, research-based foundation for its diagnostic manual? This is nothing more than science by decree. They say it is science, so it is.”
In 1998, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) conference on ADHD was unable to find scientific evidence to support ADHD as a disorder. For two and a half days the leading voices in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, pediatrics, neurology, pharmacology, nursing, family medicine and behavioural medicine pondered this.
NIH’s concluding statement was thus: “…we do not have an independent, valid test for ADHD, and there is no data to indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction” and “Finally, after years of clinical research and experience with ADHD, our knowledge about the cause or causes of ADHD remains speculative.”
There is no science to the checklist of behaviours that psychiatry uses to determine ADHD/HKD. In the Pompidou Group report, Jan Buitelaar’s and Ad Bergsma’s paper, “Sociocultural factors and the treatment of ADHD,” states: “From the standpoint of child psychiatry, ADHD is a categorical diagnosis that may be conferred following a systematic evaluation and eventually using validated behaviour checklists and interview procedures.”12
Yet, in March 1998, James Swanson of the U.S. National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), and one of the foremost proponents of ADHD as a disease, addressed a meeting of the American Society for 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.”13
Add to this, Dr. Joe Kosterich, Federal Chairman of the General Practitioners’ branch of the Australian Medical Association, who in 1999, 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.”
Dr. Mary Ann Block reiterates this, saying that while “the doctor should do everything possible to determine the reason for the symptoms,”“the psychiatrist does not do any testing. The psychiatrist listens to the history and then prescribes a drug.”
Unable to scientifically test for ADHD, today’s assertion is that ADHD is a biochemical or genetic disorder. This is mere supposition. Even Dr. Harold Pincus, vice chairman of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) task force admitted in Clinical Psychiatry News in 2000, “There has never been any criterion that psychiatric diagnoses require a demonstrated biological etiology.17 In the same article, Texas psychiatrist Dr. Theodore Pearlman said the DSM-IV has gone too far: “There are too many diagnoses without any objective basis or biological support.”
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Child Drugging