US American psychiatrist, Leon Eisenberg, born in 1922 as the son of Russian Jewish Immigrants, who was the “Scientific father of ADHD” said at the age or 87 in his last interview, “ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease.” For forty years, he served on many committees, was in influential organizations, and received awards for his work in pediatrics.
Since 1968, Leon Eisenberg’s “disease” was expressed in the diagnostic and statistical manuals, first as “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood”, now called “ADHD”. The use of ADHD medications in Germany rose in only eighteen years from 34 kg (in 1993) to a record of no less than 1760 kg (in 2011) – which is a 51-fold increase in sales. In the United States, every tenth boy among ten year-olds swallows an ADHD medication on a daily basis.
Fortunately, the Swiss National Advisory Commission on Biomedical Ethics (NEK, President: Otfried Höffe) critically commented on the use of the ADHD drug Ritalin in its opinion of 22 November 2011. The NDK criticized that it amounted to interference in the child’s freedom and personal rights, because pharmacological agents induced behavioral changes but failed to educate the child on how to achieve these behavioral changes independently. The child was deprived of an essential learning experience to act autonomously and emphatically which “considerably curtails their freedom and impairs their personality development.
Have groups marketed the diagnosis of ADHD in the service of pharmaceutical markets and tailor-made propaganda and public relations? The issue led to the investing of “financial ties” between DSM-IV Panel Members and the Pharmaceutical Industry that became a study by the American psychologist Lisa Cosgrove and others. They found that “Of the 170 DSM panel members 95 (56%) had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry.
In addition they found that one hundred percent of the members of the panels on ‘Mood Disorders’ and ‘Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders’ had financial ties to drug companies. The connections are especially strong in those diagnostic areas where drugs are the first line of treatment for mental disorders.” Today the very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry assert Dr Irwin Savodnik, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles.
One well-paid example being investigated is The Assistant Director of the Pediatric Psychopharmacology Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. It appears that he received $1 million in earnings from drug companies between 2000 and 2007. Check out Citizens Commission on Human Rights International on the internet for more information about this and more at www.cchrint.org
The task of psychologists, educators and doctors is not to put children on chemicals for their conduct. Placing children in the hands of a pharmaceutical market because the entire society cannot handle the products of its misguided theories of man and raising children is a form of insanity. Let us return to the basic matter of personal psychology and education where the child is to acquire personal responsibility and appropriate behavior under sensible guidance – and that takes the family and the schools. Learning appropriate manners and conduct is the core of the human person.
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