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Section/ADHD
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ADHD Facts
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?”
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 thinks he/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....”
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Child Drugging