I’m growing increasingly aware of the so-called “Ritalin Generation,”
and the controversy surrounding the over drugging of our nation’s
youth. How can it be that so many kids in America are being diagnosed
with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)? You
don’t need to be any sort of doctor to scratch your head at these
statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
- Parents report that approximately 9.5% of children 4-17 years of age (5.4 million) have been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2007.
- The percentage of children with a parent-reported ADHD diagnosis increased by 22% between 2003 and 2007.
- As of 2007, parents of 2.7 million youth ages 4-17 years (66.3% of
those with a current diagnosis) report that their child was receiving
medication treatment for the disorder.
- Boys are 2.8 times more likely to take medication than girls.
To be sure, it’s difficult to ignore those who say that they have
benefited from taking Ritalin. I know of many great students who swear
by taking prescribed psychotropic drugs, which they report helps with
concentration and attentiveness.
But I can’t help but wonder what scientific method proves that any
individual, regardless of age or sex, has what some other doctors call a
“fictitious disease.” I reach out to Dr. Fred A. Baughman Jr., author
of The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Makes “Patients” of Normal Children. Baughman, who for 35 years served as an adult and child neurologist, is among the nation’s most outspoken critics.
“Most are never told the diagnostic criteria are no more objective
than a teacher’s observation that their child avoids homework,
interrupts, fidgets, squirms in their seat, loses pens and pencils, and
is forgetful and disorganized,” Baughman writes. “None are ever shown a
blood test or a brain scan or any scientific proof of their child’s
supposed chemical imbalance of the brain. Why? Because they don’t
exist.”
Baughman speaks slowly and deliberately, and I sense profound anger,
passion, and frustration. To Baughman, ordering kids to take
psychotropic drugs is tantamount to child abuse—especially because of
the physical harm taking them can cause.
“Every drug is actually a poison,” he says. “Every drug is an
exogenous chemical. It’s not anything the body itself produces. In time,
every chemical is going to cause damage.”
Baughman’s book is filled with dreadful, real-life stories, where
parents and doctors blame the sudden deaths of children on an array of
psychotropic drugs. He recently testified in a trial involving an
eight-year-old boy who had been on a transdermal patch for amphetamine,
sometime used to treat ADHD. After he was on the drug for several weeks,
the boy’s mother returned to find him dead in their bathroom.
With such horrific cases in mind, I ask Baughman if he finds any
value in treating symptoms, regardless of whether doctors diagnose an
actual disease or disorder.
“We don’t just treat symptoms anymore,” he says. “Symptoms are
entirely subjective: ‘I feel lousy. I feel depressed.’ That was the
nature of medicine, back in the 1800s, 1700s; it was all treatment of
symptoms. Giving drugs to people with a variety of changeable symptoms
really has no scientific rationale whatsoever . . . . In diabetes, for
example, we know the blood sugar is measurably too high. We know the
insulin levels needed to depress the blood sugar and needed to force
sugar into cells where it can be metabolized and utilized to create
energy sources. We know that if we give insulin or give an oral
hypoglycemic agent, it’s making an abnormality more nearly normal. There
is an actual, physical rationale for it.”
Whatever the symptoms, perhaps some kids aren’t meant to sit still
for a long period of time. Rather than going from class to class,
perhaps some would prefer spending more time learning how to build a
car, grow a garden, or build a home for the needy. After all, different
should always mean in need of fixing.
Interivew transcript with Dr. Baughman
Download (PDF, 68KB)