Nineteen hundred and two was a defining moment for mental health - Attention Deficit Hyperactive
Disorder (ADHD) became a recognised condition, and although it remained a mystery to the medical
community as to what it really was, and the impact it would have on a person who suffered from it,
it laid the foundation for the very controversy that now surrounds it.
Yet it appears time has stood still surrounding ADHD in Australia.
No matter how much time has passed since 1902, it wasn’t until Dr George Still that ADHD was given
a name or first began to be treated with medication back in the 1970’s.
In Australia, ADHD is an issue of controversy. Not because of what it is, but because of the archaic
Victorian views held by almost the complete medical psychiatric community (30 out of 900 adult
psychiatrists in Victoria alone) to accept its existence or that it affects only children. Throw into the
mix, the anti-ADHD Lobby Group allegedly run by Scientologists who overtly deny the existence of
ADHD and helping shape debate around the issue.
Scientology’s influence surrounding ADHD is having a profound negative impact on Australian
mental health policy and its ability to take major steps in the treatment of ADHD.
The perception by most Australians is ADHD is a child’s illness. Those children who have it are
overzealous exuberant and wild with more than a normal zest for life and it is a condition they will
grow out of, and this perception is being fuelled by the majority of the Australian medical psychiatric
community who refuse to acknowledge ADHD as a serious permanent mental health condition ,no
matter what age the patient is!
Children in the fullness of time become adults. No medical condition can determine when a child
transitions from adolescence to adulthood – ADHD just doesn’t disappear.
Australia’s medical psychiatric community, whether it be through arrogance, ignorance or a
perceived over prescribed importance of self have failed sufferers with ADHD through misdiagnosis,
incorrect prescribing of medication or a blatant unwillingness to accept ADHD as a condition, along
with the prejudice against two of the most successful medications known to assist in the treat and
control ADHD - Dexamphetamine and Ritalin. They simply do not know, what they do not know and
in their position of medical power could be classed as potentially dangerous-strong words but they
may be apt!
Australian psychiatrists have never really understood the paradoxical effect of stimulant medications
– (Dexamphetamine and Ritalin) have on adults with ADHD. These patients do not achieve a
stimulatory high but their behaviour is more focussed or less erratic much the same way as a person
who needs glasses to correct vision.
Psychiatrists have for the past 40 years been the absolute gate keepers of the initiation and supply
of stimulant medication to the adult community.
Dexamphetamine and Ritalin correctly administered in appropriate doses do not produce an army of
addicts nor are those who suffer from ADHD likely to drop dead(as has been promulgated by various
medical quarters) on Dexamphetamine or Ritalin, not unless their treating specialist is incompetent
and not skilled in the appropriate dosage required.
The very people who need support and should be able to become functioning members of society
cannot because doctors, psychiatrists and successive governments have repeatedly failed them
along with an anti-ADHD Lobby Group that has far more influence over Government policy making
than it should – and the shelving of the NHMRC Working Party’s 2009 report into ADHD is but one
example.
Australia is lagging behind the rest of the world in the diagnosis of ADHD and how the right
medications are prescribed and how those who suffer with the condition and their families who
endure it with them are now functional effective members.
For such an advanced country in nearly all facets, Australia is a third world country in the treatment
of ADHD, and this is a national disgrace.
One third of Australia’s prisons are filled with people who have ADHD and yet shouldn’t be there.
Two of the world’s leading medical experts and pioneers in the treatment of people with ADHD are
the United States’ Professor of Psychiatric Medicine at Yale University, Russell Barkley, and Dr Daniel
Amen, founder of the Amen Clinics for people with ADHD in California.
Australia is backward in the treatment of ADHD and allowing Scientologists to control the thinking of
an overwhelming number of Australia’s psychiatrists or influence the Federal Government’s policy
making on such a critical mental health issue is disturbing.
This is not just a problem that haunts Australia, internationally Scientology is overtly offensive not
only towards ADHD but on every other issue involving Psychiatry and the administration of
medication.
Scientology’s worldwide lobby campaign and its propaganda machine is slick. Its literature not only
attacks psychiatry but engages in an insipid emotive form of psychology that questions a parent’s
love of their child, asserting - ‘no loving parent would ever allow their child to be drugged.’ It’s a
powerful play on a message that continues to have an incredible negative and what’s more
inaccurate effect on people.
Publication headlines like:
‘Psychiatry Kills – Don’t let them drug your children’
‘Psychiatry an Industry of Death with a sort of Museum in Los Angeles California’
‘The Silent Death of America’s Children’
‘How to Survive the Education System as a Parent – What to do if your child is labelled ADHD or
LD’
‘The Side effects of Common Psychiatric Drugs’
‘Anti Depressants Adderall, Bi-Polar, Anxiety Disorder, ADHD Ritalin – Are You Here? Psychiatric
Drugs and your Child’s Future’
‘S.A.D. – Social Anxiety Disorder’
There are a number of people who through the right treatment have made miraculous recoveries.
Those include the names of some very high profiled well known Australians to the average everyday
person.
Their names and Identities as case studies will be supplied on request.
Ends....
David S.Nolte