‘ADHD: A Destructive and Disempowering Label; Not an Illness’ Philip Hickey

http://www.madinamerica.com/2015/07/adhd-a-destructive-and-disempowering-label-not-an-illness/

‘Psychiatry has created and promoted the self-serving fiction that childhood distractibility/impulsivity and various other human problems are illnesses that need to be “treated” with neurotoxic chemicals and other brain-damaging interventions.  Suggesting at this very late stage in the proceedings that overuse of the ADHD “diagnosis” may be causing harm, and calling for more research on the “prevalence, causes, and consequences” of this “overdiagnosis” is just another way of endorsing and perpetuating the hoax.

The critical issue here is not that there have been errors of “over-diagnosis”.  The critical issue is the spurious medicalization of virtually every conceivable problem of human existence, including childhood distractibility/impulsivity.  This was not an error.  This was, and still is, the deliberate and self-serving policy of organized psychiatry, financed by pharma, and pursued avidly with disregard for logic, fact, or human integrity.

So why should “the impetus to…drive a moral stake in the ground” be restrained?  Psychiatry is the profession that routinely lies to its clients.  Psychiatrists tell their clients the blatant falsehood that they have chemical imbalances in their brains, and that they must take the drugs to correct these imbalances.  Psychiatry is the profession that allied itself with pharma’s fraudulent research and promotional efforts.  Psychiatry as a profession is, I suggest, morally bankrupt, and moral judgments are called for.

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Decades of generously-funded and highly-motivated psychiatric research have failed to establish that the habitual behaviors labeled ADHD stem from any kind of neurological pathology.  Nevertheless, Drs. Singh and Wessely persist in the notion that ADHD is a disease, and that more research is needed.  They call for evidence rather than speculation, while at the same time explicitly endorsing the standard psychiatric position, which is founded entirely on speculation, unsubstantiated assertions, and disregard for the evidence.’

Thank you, Philip Hickey.

Palace Gate Counselling Service, Exeter

Counselling Exeter since 1994