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Community
and Government Response
In the United States
as of 2004, seven states had passed laws prohibiting schools from coercing
parents or expelling a student if his parents refused to put him on a
psychiatric drug.
A mother in New York fought
to preserve this fundamental right of parents. After school psychologists and
psychiatrists coerced Patricia Weathers to drug her 8-year-old son when he was
diagnosed with ADHD, the child became withdrawn, could not eat or sleep and
ran away from home.
Recognizing that these
problems started with the ADHD medications, Mrs. Weathers gradually withdrew
her son from the drugs. Medical tests showed that he suffered from allergies
and anemia, and when treated, his behavior problems disappeared. He is now drug-
free and doing well.
In 1987, ADHD was voted into existence by members of the American Psychiatric
Association. Talking in class, being distracted, fidgeting or losing pencils
can result in a child being labeled �ADHD� and drugged.
Dr. William Carey, a respected
pediatrician at the Children�s Hospital of Philadelphia, says: �The current
ADHD formulation, which makes the diagnosis when a certain number of troublesome
behaviors are present and other criteria met, overlooks the fact that
these behaviors are probably usually normal.�
Psychologist Bob Jacobs
warns that psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies have turned behavioral
problems in children into disorders: �Nobody has ever presented any evidence
of a condition called ADHD except to say all these children are hyperactive;
all these children are inattentive, and therefore they all have a disease.�
The U.S. National Institutes of Health concluded in 1998, �� our knowledge about
the cause or causes of ADHD remains largely speculative.�
In 2002, the Netherlands
Advertising Commission ordered the country�s �Brain Institute� to stop falsely
advertising ADHD as a neurobiological or geneticdisorder because no scientific
evidence exists to prove this true.
The APA concedes that
there are �� no laboratory tests that have been established� to diagnose ADHD.
Israeli physician Louria
Shulamit is one of a strong and growing international coalition of responsible
professionals who object to giving children psychiatric drugs for emotional
problems: �We don�t need drugged students. We should put our efforts into finding
[the] reasons. Some of them are health problems like food intolerances or vitamin
deficiencies. Some are learning problems. As doctors, we need to find the real
problems instead of drugging children.�
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