The Relentless Diseasing Of America's Children

In 2009, pediatrician Bose Ravenel and I co-authored The Diseasing of America’s Children (Thomas Nelson), our largely vain attempt to blow the whistle on America’s ADHD industry. Largely vain because, as we discovered, very few folks want to hear the truth about the most profitable of all the bogus diagnoses ever pulled out of thin air by the mental health professions. Even though reviewers on Amazon give it a 4.5, it sold poorly, a testament to the power of lies, especially when they’re dispensed by people with impressive titles and capital letters after their names.

In the last month, without purposefully looking, I’ve come across at least two dozen online and print articles on ADHD (including so-called “Adult ADHD), all of which claim it is a brain-based disease that involves something the ADHD Establishment calls “brain differences” and/or biochemical abnormalities of some sort. All of the articles in question advance the notion that ADHD can be successfully treated with a broad-spectrum therapeutic plan that includes medication.

After all, it makes perfect sense that a “disease” defined by abnormal physiological variables calls for medication that promises to re-set those variables, however temporary the re-set may be. Right?

Yes, right. The problem, however, is that no consistent body of evidence verifies that ADHD symptoms (short attention span, difficulties with concentration and task completion, impulsivity, disorganized thinking and behavior) are the consequence of faulty biology and qualify, therefore, as a disease. When brain trauma is obvious or provable, the biology/ADHD symptoms connection can be verified, in which case the diagnosis is not ADHD…it’s brain trauma.

In basic terms, the notion that ADHD symptoms stem from faulty biology is a lie, the purpose of which is to sell psychiatric medication. When a lie makes a certain influential group lots of money, the group in question is highly motivated to sustain the lie. Simple as that.

“But John!” a reader exclaims. “My child’s behavior and school performance both improved dramatically when he began taking ADHD medication!”

Parental reports to that effect are fairly common. Furthermore, the parents in question are no doubt telling the truth. What is being suppressed is the FACT that no ADHD medicine has ever reliably outperformed placebos in controlled clinical trials. Put another way, ADHD medications work no better than bicarbonate of soda in pill form. That is why the FDA employs one set of standards when evaluating drugs designed to treat verifiable diseases (e.g., leukemia, hypertension) and a completely different set of standards concerning drugs designed to treat psychiatric diagnoses. If they used the same standards, no psychiatric drug would reach the marketplace.

In summary, psychiatric drugs don’t consistently outperform placebos, meaning their efficacy is only slightly higher than a placebo’s. The placebo effect is real. ADHD drugs sometimes “work.” No contradiction there.

The mental health professional community insists that psychiatric diagnoses listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) represent actual disease states, yet they desperately want the FDA to treat them as if they are NOT actual disease states. It’s a bait-and-switch of sorts, which should tell you that there’s something fishy going on there.

Applying Occam’s Razor, one should conclude that ADHD is not an actual disease. It is merely an arbitrary set of behaviors. On that basis, any group of behaviors can be called a disease and given a diagnostic label. Ten-year-old Judy frequently spills liquids, forgets to turn out lights, often acts put out when her parents tell her to do something, and frequently claims to smell things other people cannot smell. Judy has Non-compliant Sensory Discoordination Disorder or NSDD! Her father had similar problems as a child, so NSDD must be heritable. As such, it must involve brain-based abnormalities, so let’s try her on 50 milligrams of Lysergic Acid per day. That sound mocking, I realize; nonetheless, it describes the completely unscientific process by which behavioral habits are turned into psychiatric diagnoses, which are then marketed to the public such that Big Pharma is guaranteed a humongous cut of the spoils.

The retired director of clinical research for a well-known drug company told me that the lies perpetuated by a collusion of Big Pharma and Big Mental Health are “a scandal waiting to burst wide open.”

The sooner, the better.