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Section/ADHD
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The Neurobiological Lie
In 1998, Eugene Brody, a former president of the World Federation for Mental Health wrote, “DSM-III [in 1980] and its sequelae (DSM-III-R and DSM-IV) have had a global impact. Not only have they been widely adopted, but they and the American psychiatrists who created them have had a major influence on WHO’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10).” Subsequently, psychiatry increasingly adopted the standard of medical practice more attuned to dealing with mental disease as a biological entity, and less to mental health.”[Emphasis added]
The Pompidou Group report notes that ADHD is listed in the fourth edition of the DSM, “but in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), the classification of the World Health Organization, the label used is hyperkinetic disorder (HKD). The ICD-10 is used more often than DSM-IV in Central Europe.”
In 1998, Eugene Brody, a former president of the World Federation for Mental Health wrote, “DSM-III [in 1980] and its sequelae (DSM-III-R and DSM-IV) have had a global impact. Not only have they been widely adopted, but they and the American psychiatrists who created them have had a major influence on WHO’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10).” Subsequently, psychiatry increasingly adopted the standard of medical practice more attuned to dealing with mental disease as a biological entity, and less to mental health.”[Emphasis added]
Yet, as Lawrence Diller, M.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, and author of Running on Ritalin, says, the search for a biological marker for ADHD “is doomed from the outset because of the contradictions and ambiguities of the diagnostic construct of ADHD as defined by the DSM. I liken efforts to discover a marker to the search for the Holy Grail.” There is no “clear and confirming evidence of a physical or chemical abnormality associated with ADHD,” he said.
A 1995 report by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) stated, “despite the frequent reference to ADHD as a neurobiological disorder, the cause of ADHD remains unknown.” While the U.S. Surgeon General’s December 1999 report on mental health admitted that the exact etiology of ADHD is still not known.
Historically, there has been no shortage of alleged biochemical imbalances for psychiatric conditions. Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and author Joseph Glenmullen states: “Diligent though these attempts have been, not one has been proven. Quite the contrary. In every instance where such an imbalance was thought to have been found, it was later proven false.”
For example, Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D., an award-winning author and speaker on learning and human development, in an article entitled, “ADD: Does It Really Exist?” wrote: “In its search for a physical cause, the ADD movement reached a milestone with the 1990 publication in the New England Journal of Medicine of a study by Alan Zametkin and his colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health. This study appeared to link hyperactivity in adults with reduced metabolism of glucose…in…areas of the brain that are involved in the control of attention, planning and motor activity….
“The media picked up on Zametkin’s research and reported it nationally. ADD proponents latched on to this study as ‘proof’ of the medical basis for ADD. Pictures depicting the spread of glucose through a ‘normal’ brain compared to a ‘hyperactive’ brain began showing up in C.H.A.D.D. (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder) literature and at the organization’s conventions and meetings….commented [one ADD advocate], ‘we have an answer to skeptics who pass this off as bratty behavior caused by poor parenting.’
“What was not reported by the media or cheered by the ADD community was the study by Zametkin and the others that came out three years later in the Archives of General Psychiatry. In an attempt to repeat the 1990 study with adolescents, the researchers found no significant differences between the brains of so-called hyperactive subjects and those of so-called normal subjects…A recent critique of Zametkin’s research by faculty members at the University of Nebraska also pointed out that the study did not make clear whether the lower glucose rates in ‘hyperactive brains’ were a cause or a result of attention problems.”
Brain imaging studies using PET scanners and MRIs that claim to show brain differences in those diagnosed with ADHD are also inconclusive. A review of neuroimaging studies of child and adolescent psychiatric disorders over the past decade to 2000, and a follow up study of the same in September 2001, concluded, “Despite significant advances in the state of the art, the potential clinical applications of neuroimaging research to the psychiatric care of children has yet to be realized.”
The September 2001 follow-up study said, “Although gross differences in size or symmetry of brain structures can be quantified, 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.”
- For example, a study conducted on 21 children using MRIs and published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in April 2000, reportedly found brain abnormalities in children who had been labeled ADHD. However the ten children who had the “brain abnormalities” had already been taking methylphenidate. In fact, it is most likely that the drugs caused the “abnormality.”
- Elliot Valenstein Ph.D., biopsychologist and author of Blaming the Brain, says that the argument that a chemical imbalance is at the root of mental disorders generally “rests on shaky scientific foundation” and is “simply an unproven hypothesis.” “The theories are held onto not only because there is nothing else to take their place, but also because they are useful in promoting drug treatment.”
- He adds, “...there are no tests available for assessing the chemical status of a living person’s brain. While there are some reports of finding evidence of an excess or deficiency in the activity of a particular neurotransmitter system in the brains of deceased mental patients, these claims are controversial, as other investigators cannot find any such relationship.”
- Loren Mosher, a former NIMH researcher and a 30-year member of the APA, says: “Biologically based brain diseases are convenient for families and practitioners alike.” He added, “It is no-fault insurance against responsibility. We are just helplessly caught up in a swirl of brain pathology for which no one, except DNA, is responsible....The fact that there is no evidence confirming brain disease attribution is, at this point irrelevant.”
- Psychiatrist David Kaiser, notes: “...modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness...Patients [have] been diagnosed with ‘chemical imbalances’ despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and...there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like.”
- Additionally, Dr. Kaiser says, “In general, biologic psychiatry has not delivered on its grandiose and utopian claims.” Meanwhile, patients have been subjected to “years of medication trials which have done nothing except reify [materialized] in them an identity as a chronic patient with a bad brain. This identification as a biologically-impaired patient is one of the most destructive effects of biologic psychiatry. At the level of the individual patients this means a growing number of over-diagnosed, overmedicated and disarticulated people less able to define and control their own identities and lives....”
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Genetic Supposition:
Claims that mental disorders are genetic are also mere supposition.
- Harvard professor Richard Lewontin, author of Biology as Ideology, says that genetic studies are propaganda in the “ideology of biological determinism.” What appears to be “the mythical guise of pure science and objective knowledge about nature turns out, underneath, to be political, economic, and social ideology.”
- Valenstein says that “...while genetic factors may predispose people to develop in certain ways, they certainly do not dictate personality, mental traits, or behaviour.”
- Dr. Vidya Bhushan, an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the New York Medical College states, “Despite evidence of hereditary factors in causing ADD/ADHD, an ‘ADD/ADHD gene’ has not been discovered. Until a definite gene can be identified, only children with facial or other abnormalities suggestive of genetic conditions…should be seen by genetic disease specialists.”
“Undaunted,” says Dr. Glenmullen, “some doctors act as though depression and other mental states have been proven to be genetic. As part of conveying this impression, ‘family history’ is emphasized in evaluating patients. Even if a patient lacks a family member with depression, a relative—even a distant relative—who might be described as vaguely ‘moody,’ ‘eccentric,’ ‘irritable,’ or ‘alcoholic’ will be noted as ‘depressed’ and the patient described as having a family history of depression. With such a loose definition, almost anyone might be thought to have inherited depression.”
Consider also the following statements from experts:
- William B. Carey of the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, speaking at the 1998 NIH conference on ADHD, concluded, “What is now most often described as ADHD in the United States appears to be a set of normal behavioural variations…This discrepancy leaves the validity of the construct [of ADHD as a ‘disease’] in doubt….”
- According to a study in the January 1, 2000 edition of the Journal of Learning Disabilities, “The neurobiological and neuroanatomical substrate of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) remains unclear. There is no biological marker for ADHD.”
- In The Hyperactivity Hoax, psychiatrist Sydney Walker cites physician Warren Weinberg and colleagues as stating: “A large number of biologic studies have been undertaken to characterize ADHD as a disease entity, but results have been inconsistent and not reproducible because the major features of ADHD are merely symptoms of a variety of disorders.”
- Gene R. Haislip, Deputy Assistant Administrator, Office of Diversion Control, Drug Enforcement Administration, wrote: “We are also unaware that ADHD has been validated as a biologic/organic syndrome or disease.”
- From an article posted on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s website in 1999: “There is no biological test for ADHD. Doctors base their diagnosis on guidelines set by the American Psychiatric Association”.
- Finally, Dr. Fred A. Baughman, Jr., a pediatric neurologist, states, “The fact that psychiatrists do not perform physical examinations or neurological examinations by which disease of the brain and nervous system is determined, makes their claims of diagnosing and treating ‘biologically based brain diseases’ not only unbelievable but a fraud…With no proof whatsoever they tell you your problem is ‘in your brain’ and, therefore, isn’t your fault. They dissuade troubled persons from looking at and addressing the causes of life’s real problems in the interest of pushing their pills.”
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Child Drugging