The Hoax of “Chemical Imbalance”

Through massive promotion and marketing campaigns, psychiatric drugs are increasingly prescribed as the panacea for life’s inevitable crises and challenges.

Psychiatry’s most recent campaign is the theory that all mental problems stem from a “chemical imbalance” in the brain, or “neurobiological disorder.”

Psychiatrist David Kaiser is unequivocal about the lie of neurobiological disorder: “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.”

In 2001, Ty C. Colbert, Ph.D., author of Rape of the Soul: How the Chemical Imbalance Model of Modern Psychiatry Has Failed Its Patients, said, “As with all other mental disorders, there is no biological test or biological marker for ADHD.” He cites the U.S. National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference on ADHD that concluded, “As with all other emotional disorders, however, researchers have vigorously attempted to find proof that ADHD is caused by a chemical imbalance, but have come up with nothing.”

When this idea of a “chemical imbalance” is successfully used to secure the cooperation of unwitting parents, it establishes a dangerous precedent. “These children believe they have something wrong with their brains that makes it impossible for them to control themselves without using a pill,” says Dr. Baughman.

By “pill” of course is meant hazardous and addictive amphetamine-like stimulants or antidepressants like Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs).

With millions of children fraudulently labeled with “ADHD,” psychiatrists are creating a generation of drug addicts. The manufacturer of methylphenidate (Ritalin) admits it is a drug of dependency. And addictive drugs spawn a culture of drug dealing and abuse. Ritalin and other stimulants are now sold illicitly in schools in numerous countries for $2 to $10 a pill. More potent than cocaine, children crush the tablets and snort it. “Quite a few have tried it. Most of the lads (boys) ‘bomb’ it by smoking it, some mix it up with glucose and snort it,” Simon, a 14-year-old British student said. In Britain, children as young as six are becoming hooked on a psychoactive stimulant sold illegally by child dealers.

Worldwide production of methylphenidate increased from 2.8 tons in 1990 to 15.3 tons in 1997. In Mexico, sales of this stimulant rose 800% between 1993 and 2001.

Australia reports a stimulant prescription rate for children increasing 34-fold in the past two decades. Some 250,000 prescriptions for dexamphetamine, which outsells Ritalin, were written in 2003. 32 In 2002, the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly said the highest rates of methylphenidate consumption in Europe were in Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium and Luxemburg. In Britain the stimulant prescription rate for children soared 9,200% between 1992 and 2000.

A further 1.5 million children and adolescents are taking SSRI antidepressants in the United States. In Canada, the number of girls aged 15 to 18 taking antidepressants almost doubled between 1998 and 2002. In Britain, the number of prescriptions for antidepressants has also more than doubled in 10 years.

In today’s school in Queensland, Australia, schoolchildren no longer line up for milk, but queue for drugs to control their “behavior problems.” Teachers spend their days dispensing “medication.” It is not a job that they enjoy. As one teacher remarked, “As an early childhood teacher it breaks my heart to have to administer [these drugs] to children as young as three and then to see them spend their day in a zombie-like state.”

The results for children have been catastrophic.

Thomas Moore, author of Prescriptions for Disaster, said that the current use of drugs like Ritalin is taking “appalling risks” with a generation of kids. The drug is given, he said, for “short-term control of behavior—not to reduce any identifiable hazard to [children’s] health. Such large-scale chemical control of human behavior has not been previously undertaken in our society outside of nursing homes and mental institutions.”

Next

Back to Contents