Questionable psychiatry

Published on Thursday 27 December 2007 19:11

The number of drugs prescribed to badly behaved children in Scotland has risen (your report, 19 December), with drugs commonly prescribed for the psychiatric label "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" (ADHD) increasing by 20 per cent last year.

This trend of labelling children with ADHD has a fundamental flaw that psychiatrists work desperately to conceal. The flaw lies in the inability to produce any test to confirm the presence of such a "disorder". That doesn't mean children don't experience problems, and it doesn't mean parents don't have days when they pull their hair out.

The profit-driven psychiatric profession has manufactured ADHD as an excuse for bad behaviour in the boisterous, argumentative, defiant, inattentive, disruptive, forgetful child or adolescent. But ADHD is nothing more than a psychiatric ASBO. While we don't always question diagnoses, and while we place our trust in medical doctors who can and do provide empirical evidence, such standards are non-existent when it comes to psychiatry.

The common denominators in this charade are opinions and vested interests. Manufacture a psychiatric label, shroud it in medical legitimacy, and concoct an expensive chemical. Then give it to children and adolescents, produce nullifying effects and hail this as "demonstrably effective". In fact, all that has happened is the child or adolescent has been drugged, and is exhibiting the effects of a dangerous mind-altering foreign substance in his or her body. There is no therapeutic value.

BRIAN DANIELS

Citizens Commission on Human Rights

East Grinstead, West Sussex