Psychiatry has long been seen as a duster. There are so many diseases and disorders that are described in their manuals that today the strange thing is to have nothing. After blowing up alarms by including tantrums in the latest DSM Pediatrics Manual (the bible of psychiatrists) and after seeing how the U.S. government states in a report that 1 in 5 children has a mental health disorder, figures that seem an insult to the common sense of the population, because it is impossible for so many children to be mentally ill, statements of Leon Eisenberg, the psychiatrist who "discovered" ADHD, which does not leave anyone indifferent who lives or works with children.
The German weekly Der Spiegel, in an article that highlighted the increase in mental illness in the German population, explained that Eisenberg said, seven months before dying, when he was 87 years old, that "ADHD is an example of a fictional disease".
The beginnings of ADHD
The first attempts to try to explain that there were children with ADHD occurred in 1935. By that time, doctors had treated primary school children for the first time with a restless character and with difficulty concentrating on what they were asked for, under diagnosis. from post-brain syndrome. It was an attempt that did not work because of course, most of those children had never had encephalitis.
In the sixties the protagonist of our history appeared, Leon Eisenberg, who spoke again of this disease, but this time with another name, "hyperkinetic reaction of childhood". Under this diagnosis he was able to treat difficult students, trying different psychoactive drugs with them. He started with dextroamphetamine and then used the methylphenidate, a drug with which he achieved his goal and which today prevails as a treatment of choice: energetic children became docile children.
In 1968 the "childhood hyperkinetic reaction" was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and since then is part of that manual, only that Now it is known as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
The achievement of Eisenberg and his collaborators was to get people to believe that ADHD has genetic causes, which is a disease with which it is born. He himself said, along with the words in which he said it was an invented disease, that the idea that a child has ADHD (we understand that the idea that a child is very moved and is a problematic student) from birth I was overrated. However, by getting this to settle in the population and in the parents, the feeling of guilt disappears, the parents feel relieved because the child was born that way and the treatment is less questionable. In 1993, 34 kg of methylphenidate were sold in German pharmacies. In 2011, 1,760 kg were sold.
The well-known psychiatrist, who came to take over the management of the psychiatry service at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where he was recognized as one of the most famous professionals in neurology and psychiatry in the world, decided confess the truth months before dying affected from a prostate cancer, adding that What a child psychiatrist should do is try to determine the psychosocial reasons that can cause behavior problems. See if there are problems with the parents, if there are discussions in the family, if the parents are together or apart, if there are problems with the school, if the child has trouble adapting, why it costs, etc. To all this he added that, logically, this takes time, a job and accompanied by a sigh concluded: "prescribing a pill against ADHD is much faster" (To which I would add "and much more advantageous to the psychiatry business").
The psychiatry business
As I said at the beginning of the entry it seems that psychiatry is a monster capable of taking anything ahead, with a ravenous hunger, that does not stop and that will do everything possible to try to ensure that every healthy person ends up taking one or another medication to treat their (not) illness. They are seen with the duster, and one more proof of this is that there is already the next disease that will be spread throughout childhood: bipolar disorder or manic-depressive illness.
Until the 1990s it was an unknown condition in children. Now it is one of the most frequent diagnoses in child psychiatry, to the point that visits for this disorder have multiplied by 40 in less than ten years, many of the "sick" children being two and three years old.
One of those responsible for the arrival of bipolar disorder in the US It is the psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, who has been doing studies and conferences on the subject for years and who received 1.6 million dollars between 2000 and 2007, from the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured the drugs for this disorder, apparently to devote to Keep investigating the disease.
But this is not all. In order to know the real scope of the psychiatry business, to see to what extent diseases are invented and then able to give the drugs that already exist, a study by the American psychologist Lisa Cosgrove revealed that, of the 170 members of the working group of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), that is, those who make the manual of world reference psychiatry, 95 (56%) had one or more financial relationships with companies in the Pharmaceutical Industry.
Is there ADHD?
I do not know if it exists or does not exist (and that the one who invented it says no), nor is it up to me to answer this question, however I am sure that there are many children diagnosed whose only sin has been to be too much moved, or being too insistent when demanding a little more attention from their parents. Already more than two years ago I offered you two tickets in which I explained how ADHD is diagnosed, so you could see that there is no diagnostic test of any kind that determines that a child has the aforementioned disorder. Everything is done based on observation and based on the fulfillment or not of criteria or parameters that normal children should do.
However, What is being normal? Krishnamurti said that "It is not a sign of good health to be well adapted to a deeply ill society"So who knows, maybe the children who rebel at the attempt to tame them, those who can't stand sitting listening to things that don't interest them, those who would rather be able to decide what to do in their lives at all times, those who want to try everything and leave nothing, perhaps they are after all the most sane.
I do not say that any of these children have nothing. I do not say that they do not need help, because it is very likely that many of them have many problems, but I have never believed in the existence of a disorder that affects 10% of children and much less I have believed in the miraculous cure of methylphenidate, because While children change their behavior, the problems that made the child work in an unaccepted way are still there.
