ADHD—How Psychiatry Makes “Patients” of Normal Children
(The Greatest, Most Brazen, Health Care Fraud in History)
(3140 words)
By Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD
In 1976, Henry Gadsden, CEO of pharmaceutical giant, Merck, told Fortune
magazine of his distress that their potential markets had been limited to sick
people—people proved to have a disease. Suggesting he’d rather Merck be
more like chewing gum maker Wrigley’s, Gadsden said it had long been his
dream to make drugs for healthy people. Because then, Merck would be
able to “sell to everyone.” Shortly thereafter, the revered Merck Manual,
supposedly a scientific textbook of medicine began referring to
“depression”—ubiquitous, normal, in humankind--as a disease.
ADHD—DISEASE PROTOTYPE
First they told you when your child didn’t pay attention, didn’t follow
through, was distractible, forgetful, fidgety, on the go, blurted out, didn’t
wait his turn, interrupted--that he had a brain disease that needed treatment
with amphetamines. [1] Now they tell Australians, your child has a disease,
a ‘chemical imbalance’ so severe that if you—the parent—doesn’t see it and
“treat” it that the child deserves nothing less than to be removed from its
feckless parents by CPS social workers and police so they will get this
“treatment” they so desperately need.
When I began medical practice (board certified in neurology and child
neurology) in 1964 we would read now and then of a child being courtordered to have insulin for his diabetes, a blood transfusion for surgery, or,
years later, chemotherapy for cancer, over the wishes of parents rejecting
such treatment for often for religious reasons. But we never heard of a court
removing a law-abiding child from its law-abiding parents for their failure to
drug that child for a psychiatric ‘disease’—perhaps because there was no
such thing as a psychiatric “disease”. And there still isn’t, despite
psychiatry’s and the pharmaceutical industry’s best efforts to get everyone in
the world to believe all painful emotions and desperate, rueful behaviors are
‘diseases’/ ‘chemical imbalances’ of the brain.
WHAT IS A DISEASE/PHYSICAL ABNORMALITY?
It is really very basic: Without a physical abnormality—gross (enlarged
head, enlarged liver), microscopic (cancer cells seen by a pathologist from a
Pap smear or biopsy) or chemical (elevated phenylalanine in PKU, galactose
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in galactosemia, or other quantifiable chemicals in the over 100 real ‘inborn
errors of metabolism’) there is no disease. Should you fail to understand
this—the reason there is no such thing as a psychiatric disease/chemical
imbalance/physical abnormality in all of psychiatry--and you will surely
follow the path of the US where 5.4 million of its children were called
ADHD—diseased in 2007, up by a million since 2003. Nor has this
unbelievable, obscene growth stopped.
In 1971 I discovered and described a genetic disease in which each affected
family member had a combination of curly hair, ankyloblepharon (fused
eyelids) and nail dysplasia—CHANDS.[2] Observing any one of the
abnormalities, any physician would have to conclude an abnormality is
present--a disease! Finding all three in the same patient establishes that that
particular disease is CHANDS—Baughman’s syndrome (not to be confused
with the other Baughman’s syndrome I discovered and described in 1969—
Klinefelter’s syndrome in combination with essential tremor.[3]). This is
two more real diseases than have ever been discovered and described by
organized psychiatry (and I have discovered others).
PSYCHIATRY PERVERTED
The only honest, Hippocratic psychiatrists are those who make no
dehumanizing claims that they diagnose and ‘treat’ diseases when
confronted by normal human beings in mental anguish and distress—the
only such terms to be applied. Again--in psychiatry, there are no physical
abnormalities—there are no diseases. Nor is this because I say so. Rather it
is because no such thing as a psychiatric ‘disease’ can be found in the
world’s scientific-medical literature. But because psychiatrists are
physicians, because they have been to medical school, and because no one
can imagine that whole groups of physicians would lie, when they say
‘disease’/ ‘abnormality’/ ‘chemical imbalance’ they are believed in part or in
whole and the child or adult before them is made ‘diseased’—a ‘patient’—a
life-long, very profitable, drug receptacle. They think nothing of the fact
that they have just terminated the normal life of that person-made-patient—
that they have ‘medicalized’ the life of that once-normal child or adult.
VICTIMS
Diane Booth a single mother from San Jose, California, had the temerity to
tell her son’s teachers she didn’t believe in ADHD and wouldn’t give him
Ritalin. The next week CPS social workers and police removed her 6-yearold son, Vincent, and had him placed in a child psychiatric hospital where he
would spend the next 12 (or more) years of his life--always on a cocktails of
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drugs. I filed a ‘child abuse’ form with the Attorney General of California,
charging the juvenile court judge and the state of California with child
abuse. Initially Diane, a wounded, impassioned mother wrote and spoke out.
But she too was jailed. Today Vincent is 18 and Diane—defeated--has no
idea where he is.
Syreeta, a single mother, has been court-ordered to take an antipsychotic—a
whole-brain, whole-body poison, as a condition for visitations with her very
own, biological daughter. And, no, there is no such thing as a safe, lowest
possible dose of any antipsychotic—they are that poisonous.
Angelia, 12, was ‘kidnapped’ by the state of North Carolina from the only
parents that ever fed or loved her or taught her to speak or to read or become
‘normal’ while rejecting court-ordered drugs. Nor did my testimony in
Wilmington, NC make a difference. The judge with no medical credentials
whatsoever deemed the drugs essential” even though I testified under oath
that none of Angelia’s five psychiatric “disorders” were actual diseases or
abnormalities making her anything but normal.
10 year-old Page of Long Beach, California is kept on psychiatric drug
cocktails, an antipsychotic included, despite conspicuous adverse effects and
my testimony, as time-after-time, that there is no such thing as a psychiatric
disease, a psychiatric abnormality to be made normal. There are only,
inevitably, the real abnormalities/diseases caused by the poisons/toxins
prescribed, an abnormality/disease demonstrable by assaying for the
drug/poison (not medication because there is no disease) in their every organ
and body fluid during life or at death.
“Ten grams of marijuana—to little for a misdemeanor charge,” and yet child
welfare kidnapped Penelope Harris’s son and niece. Her son, 10 spent more
than a week in foster care and her niece, 8, more than a year. For this they
took her niece for a year! Hundreds of New Yorkers caught with less than
misdemeanor-amounts of marijuana have become ensnared in just such child
neglect cases. An estimated 730,000 New Yorkers use marijuana—robust,
unwelcome competition for the psychiatry-pharmaceutical combine.[4]
In the family and juvenile courts of the nation, psychiatric diagnosing and
drugging is enforced under threat of termination of custody—of ripping your
child, your children, natural-born and otherwise, from you, and you, from
them. This is what happened to Penelope Harris and her children and what
happens year in and year out to tens of thousands of families in the US,
bartering them to foster care where 50 to 75 percent or more—unfortunates,
not sick, ill, or diseased are psychiatrically labeled and drugged. Later they
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are adopted out but always with the proviso that they remain psychiatric
patients on psychiatric drugs--lifelong.
The late, great Georgia State Senator, Nancy Schafer told me of her
emotional meeting with 38 constituents who had had their children “stolen”
by CPS mostly for reasons having to do with the fraudulent psychiatric
‘labeling’ and for-profit ‘treatment’ of which we now speak.
Are we, the US, where this—the greatest health-care fraud of all time was
conceived--still a democracy? What are we to be called when they order
that we ourselves be drugged or when they kidnap, keep, and poison our
children? Josef Stalin did just this sort of thing.
FRED BAUGHMAN MD GOES TO AUSTRALIA
Having testified before the Special Committee on ADHD of the West
Australia (Perth) Parliament, June 2, 2004, telling them in no uncertain
terms that ADHD and all psychiatric diagnoses were not diseases I wrote the
Committee, June 25, 2004 explaining:
“By now there should be no doubt that that no child or adult said to have
a psychiatric “disorder”/ “illness”/ “syndrome”/ “disease”/ “chemical
imbalance” has an abnormality/disease in a true medical sense. Instead,
all of them are physically/medically normal. Further, it is this
lie/perversion of science and medicine, invented and exported by US
psychiatry in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry that is the lynchpin/sole basis of the still-burgeoning, worldwide epidemic of psychiatric
drugging/poisoning. Nor is this a matter of belief, consensus, or opinion,
rather it has to do with the fact that nowhere in the scientific/medical
literature of the world does replicated proof exist that ADHD (by
whatever name) or any psychiatric disorder is a physical
abnormality/disease. It is every treating physician’s duty to
demonstrate/prove the existence of a disease, and define that disease,
before commencing with medical or surgical treatments—treatments that
bear actual physical risks every time. As you can see in the thirty (30)
supporting documents I have submitted, I have been seeking proof of the
psychiatry’s “disease” claims for well over a decade, eliciting
confessions that there are none, or, as in the majority of cases, (eliciting)
no responses at all.”
On December 6, 2004 I wrote the Special Committee (of the West Australia
Parliament) enclosing copies of my letters to:
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1. Professor Don Robertson, President, Paediatrics and Child Health
Division, Royal Australasian College of Physicians
2. Dr. Vince Caruso, President, Royal College of Pathology of
Australasia (RCPA)
3. Professor David Burke, President, Australian Academy of Neurology
(AAN), and,
4. Dr. William Glasson, President, Australian Medical Association
I explained:
“They owe it to you and to the citizens of WA and all of Australia, to
speak to you, truthfully, forthrightly, as to whether or not
psychiatric/psychological conditions/diagnoses are ever actual
diseases. The answer is a matter of science and fact, not belief and
consensus. The answer is “never”!
I got a response from a secretary at the Australia Medical Association
advising me that an answer would be forthcoming but it never came. I
continued:
“If these leaders of Australian medicine fail to forthrightly advise the
citizens of Australia as to whether or not psychiatric diagnoses are
actual diseases they are in collusion with those of the pharmaceutical
industry and psychiatry who so heinously victimize them subverting
your democracy.”
PSYCHIATRY DEFINES ‘DISORDER’
It is instructive to see how psychiatry defines the “disorders” it diagnoses
and appends to so many millions more from one decade to the next. In
2010, Stein et al, [5] speaking for all of psychiatry wrote:
“What is a mental/psychiatric disorder?…The explicit DSM-IV
position that mental/psychiatric disorders cannot easily be precisely
operationally defined seems basically correct.”
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PSYCHIATRIC DISEASE
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In 2006 I wrote “There Is No Such Thing as a Psychiatric
Disorder/Disease/Chemical Imbalance.”[6]
Phillips [7] states: “ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder]
joins ‘dyslexia’ and ‘glue ear’ as disorders that are considered
significant primarily because of their effects on educational
performance”.
In medicine—but not psychiatry--a “disorder” is “a disturbance of
function, structure, or both,” and thus, the equivalent of an objective
abnormality/disease [8]. Dyslexia has never been proved to be a
disorder/disease. “Glue ear,” however, is the equivalent of otitis
media, an objective abnormality/ disease. Phillips continues: “In the
case of ADHD, there has been a complex, often heated debate in the
public domain about the verity of the illness,” but proceeds, without
an answer, to consider “the roles of teachers as brokers for ADHD and
its treatment.”
In 1948, the still-joint specialty of “neuropsychiatry” was divided into
“neurology,” dealing with diseases, and “psychiatry,” dealing with
emotions and behaviors [9]. If there is a macroscopic (visibly large
head in hydrocephalus), microscopic (cancer cells from a Pap smear
or biopsy) or chemical abnormality (elevated phenylalanine in PKU or
other chemicals in the more than 100 real, objectively verifiable
“inborn errors of metabolism”), a disease is present. Nowhere in the
brains or bodies of children said to have ADHD or any other
psychiatric diagnosis has a disorder/disease been confirmed.
Psychiatric drugs appeared in the fifties. Psychiatry and the
pharmaceutical industry authored the “chemical imbalance” market
strategy: they would call all things psychological “chemical
imbalances” needing “chemical balancers”—pills.”
ADHD—INVENTED NOT DISCOVERED
At the September 29, 1970, hearing on Federal Involvement in the Use of
Behavior Modification Drugs on Grammar School Children, Ronald Lipman
of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), argued: “hyperkinesis is a
medical syndrome. It should be properly diagnosed by a medical doctor”
[10].
In 1986, Nasrallah et al. [11] reported brain atrophy in adult males treated
with amphetamines as children, concluding: “since all of the HK/MBD
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[hyperkinetic disorder/minimal brain dysfunction] patients had been treated
with psychostimulants, cortical atrophy may be a long-term adverse effect of
this treatment.”
At the 1998 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Consensus Development
Conference on ADHD, Carey [12] stated: “The ADHD behaviors are
assumed to be largely or entirely due to abnormal brain function. The DSMIV does not say so but textbooks and journals do.... What is now most often
described as ADHD appears to be a set of normal behavioral variations.”
With no proof of disease, the child, the adult, is yet normal.
However Swanson and Castellanos [13], having reviewed the structural
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) research, testified: “Recent
investigations provide converging evidence that a refined phenotype of
ADHD/HKD (hyperkinetic disorder) is characterized by reduced size in
specific neuroanatomical regions of the frontal lobes and basal ganglia.”
I challenged Swanson from a floor microphone asking: “Why didn't you
mention that virtually all of the ADHD subjects were on stimulant therapy—
the likely cause of their brain atrophy?” [14] Swanson confessed this was
so—that there had been no such studies of ADHD-untreated cohorts.
The Consensus Conference Panel could only conclude: “We do not have a
valid test for ADHD... there are no data to indicate that ADHD is a brain
malfunction” [15].
This wording appeared in the print version of the final statement of the
Consensus Conference Panel distributed at the press conference the final day
of the Consensus Conference, November 18, 1998. Thereafter, it was
published for an indeterminate time on the NIH Web site, but was
subsequently replaced with wording claiming “validity” for ADHD--an
attempted fraud seeking to preserve the false image of ADHD as a disease.
In 2002, Castellanos et al. [16] published the one and only MRI study of an
ADHD-untreated group. However, because the ADHD-untreated patients
were two years younger than the controls, the study was invalid, leaving
stimulant treatment, not the never-validated disorder, ADHD, the likely
cause of the brain atrophy.
In 2002, Daniel Weinberger, of the National Institute of Mental Health,
claimed “major psychiatric diseases” are associated with “subtle but
objectively characterizable changes” but could reference not a single proof
(quoted in [17]).
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Most importantly, in 2002, the Advertisement Commission of Holland [18]
determined that the claim that ADHD is an inborn brain dysfunction was
misleading and enjoined the Brain Foundation of the Netherlands to cease
such representations. This is what needs being done worldwide.
In 2003, Ireland prohibited GlaxoSmithKline from claiming that the
antidepressant Paxil “works by bringing serotonin levels back to
normal.”[19,20] Wayne Goodman of the FDA acknowledged that claims
that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors correct a serotonin imbalance go
“too far,” but had the temerity to suggest that “this is reasonable shorthand
for expressing a chemically or brain-based problem”.
At an FDA hearing on March 23, 2006, I testified [21]: “Saying any
psychiatric diagnosis ‘is a brain-based problem and that the medications are
normalizing function’ is an anti-scientific, pro-drug lie. And yet this has
become standard practice throughout medicine, for example, at the
American Psychiatric Association, American Medical Association,
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American
Academy of Pediatrics, Child Neurology Society, American Academy of
Family Physicians, FDA, and virtually all US government health-care
agencies.”
Journal articles, press releases, ads, drug inserts, and research informed
consent documents say, or infer, that psychological diagnoses are
abnormalities/diseases. All patients and research participants with
psychological problems are led to believe they have an abnormality/disease,
biasing them in favor of medical interventions, and against nonmedical
interventions (e.g., love, will power, or talk therapy), which presume only
that the individual is physically and medically normal and without need of a
medical/pharmaceutical intervention.
The FDA is the agency most responsible for conveying the facts needed by
the public to make risk versus benefit and informed consent decisions.
Instead—by protecting industry, not the public—the FDA is a purveyor of
the psychiatric “disease” and “chemical imbalance” lie.
HEALTH CANADA & FDA CONFESS
Psychiatrists and Big Pharma’s direct-to-the-public drug advertisements
invariably say or imply that psychiatric “diseases” or “chemical imbalances”
are real diseases. But a Nov 10, 2008, letter from Supriya Sharma, MD,
MPH, FRCPC, Director General of Health Canada (their counterpart of our
FDA) to the father, B.V., of a multiply “diagnosed,” “drugged,” 12 year-old
boy confessed: “For mental/psychiatric disorders in general, including
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depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and ADHD, there are no confirmatory
gross, microscopic or chemical abnormalities that have been validated for
objective physical diagnosis.” On March 12, 2009, Donald Dobbs,
Consumer Safety Officer, Division of Drug Information, FDA, wrote to me,
concurring with the Health Canada statement, stating: “No psychiatric
diagnosis is an actual disease.”
WE ARE ALL VICTIMS OF “DISORDER”/ “DISEASE” CRIME
The ADHD lie and ensuing epidemic amphetamine poisoning is the biggest
health care fraud of all time, and the template for world-wide psychiatry’s
other “disorders”/ “diseases”/ “chemical imbalances of the brain. None of
them are diseases, as portrayed, but a singular assault on our individual
liberties guaranteed in our respective constitutions.
Should you grant that any part of their “diagnosing” and “treatment” is
legitimate you will, to that extent, enable them and assure your own, your
children’s and your country’s continued victimization at their hands (this
includes persons of the pharmaceutical industry, psychiatrists, all physicians
and all politicians who collude in this fraud against you and all Australian
citizens).
Those who have perpetrated this fraud and poisoning upon you and yours
should be brought, before appropriate governmental bodies and courts, and
should be indicted, sworn, tried, and sentenced.
Moreover this matter, world-wide as it is, should be referred without delay
to the International Criminal Court at the Hague, as, without doubt, the
entire world is under assault from the pharmaceutical-psychiatric cartel
I will gladly come to Australia to testify, under oath and to defend all I write
and say against any Australian psychiatrists, physicians or other persons.
Sincerely,
Fred A Baughman Jr. MD
*Bibliography attached.
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