The word “hysteria” does not mean “wildly or melodramatically emotional,” although it can be used that way to describe certain people in certain situations.
Hysteria is a psychological problem largely dependent on the attention patients receive from their significant others, whether family, physician, or psychiatrist.
For example, Jean-Martin Charcot’s patients in the late nineteenth century mimicked the symptoms of epilepsy because they were housed on the same ward as epileptics who received considerable attention from Charcot. When the hysterics (after Charcot’s death) were moved to another ward, their epileptic symptoms disappeared.
Hysteria is a form of self-deception, as psychiatrist Paul R. McHugh puts it in his 2008 book Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind, in which patients imitate physical or psychological disorders.
Competent physicians determine when hysteria is operating, not a more serious physical or psychological disorder, by observing how careful hysterics are, for example, not to experience urinary incontinence or to hit their heads when fainting.
McHugh discusses the psychology of the repressed memory craze of the 1980s and ‘90s, the place of hysteria in it, and his role in defending a number of the accused.
The repressed memory (also known as recovered memory) craze consisted usually of adult women who, under treatment by what McHugh calls “Manneristic Freudians,” recovered alleged repressed memories of sexual assault and rape, usually by their fathers or other members of their families.*
A significant impetus for the repressed memory craze was the 1973 book and subsequent television movie Sybil, about a woman with alleged multiple personality disorder. A consulting psychiatrist to the authors said Sybil was a hysteric who role-played multiple personalities at the suggestion of one of the authors.
The publisher, however, expressed a strong desire for a book on multiple personality disorder, insisting that hysteria would not sell. The authors went along.
The “Mannerist” therapists almost from the beginning suggested to vulnerable and suggestible, frequently depressed, people that they may have been sexually abused, but don’t remember it, by a member of their family and that they may be suffering from “multiple personality disorder.”
Hypnotic suggestion and leading questioning, supported by a huge literature asserting (not proving) that repression causes amnesia of trauma, were the treatments of choice. Patients often exaggerated and escalated their symptoms, supposedly recalling memories of sex abuse as an infant and as the result of Satanic rituals.
Therapists seldom, if ever, interviewed family members or others who might have had important, relevant information.
Many patients sued the family member they accused and, in some cases, brought criminal charges. Prison was not uncommon.
McHugh and others defended the accused, pointing out that trauma of any kind is not forgotten or repressed and that competent therapists have their hands full helping trauma patients cope with the omnipresent memories and emotions. Memory researchers pointed out how malleable our memories can be, especially if we are vulnerable and depressed.**
In one of the trials at which McHugh testified (pp. 76-85), he stated that the patient, Donna, who was suing her father, suffered from “induced hysterical disorder,” induced by the type of therapy she received leading Donna to imitate symptoms of mental illness.
The trial ended in a hung jury, with eleven jurors voting to acquit. After trial dismissal by the judge, the holdout juror subsequently called Donna for a date. The hospital sent Donna to foster care many miles away. She soon began having doubts about her “memories” and accusations. Donna eventually reconnected with her family and sued the hospital and doctor.
Memories of nearly all accusers in the repressed memory craze were false. Lawsuits against therapists and hospitals eventually led to a modest decline in repressed memory therapies and clinics. Repressed memory also became suspect in most courts of law.
McHugh relates the story of the Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials of 1692-93 as a fascinating parallel to the hysteria of the repressed memory craze (pp. 157-60).
Eleven Salem girls complained of pains and other miseries. A doctor diagnosed them as possessed by Satan’s representatives, the witches, who were causing their afflictions.
The girls then escalated their behavior to writhing on the floor and screaming, and because they were supposedly licensed to accuse who was a witch, they proceeded to do just that. Twenty people were executed and over a hundred imprisoned.
A telling incident occurred when the girls were traveling to Gloucester to testify at a witch trial. On the way, they saw an old woman near the Ipswich bridge, assumed she was a witch, and began their performances. However, the people of Ipswich yawned and paid no attention to them. The girls stopped their contortionate display, got back on their horses, and continued on to Gloucester.
Witch trials ended when the Massachusetts Bay Colony governor, whose wife was accused of being a witch, consulted ministers in New York. The ministers declared spectral evidence (dreams, visions) invalid in a court of law, which was valid at the time in Massachusetts. The governor banned spectral evidence and the episode soon ended. Apologies by some girls and other promoters occurred a few years later.
Today’s repressed memory craze, unfortunately, is not over, according to science writer Mark Pendergrast in his 2017 book Memory Warp: How the Myth of Repressed Memory Arose and Refuses to Die. Pendergrast exhaustively presents the history and theory of the craze, and, most importantly, arguments against its theory.
Pendergrast cites Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy from the early 1970s to raise an interesting question. Janov encouraged his patients to “relive buried trauma memories” by screaming them out. “Of all of Janov’s cases related in his first book,” says Pendergrast, “only one involved incest memories.”
How is it, asks Pendergrast, that allegedly repressed sex abuse memories did not overwhelm Janov’s therapy sessions and were not discovered until, and grew exponentially in, the 1980s and ‘90s? (Pendergrast, Kindle version, location 2565-67, chapter 2)
The repressed memory craze is still alive and well today. “Many of the allegations against Jerry Sandusky, the ex-Penn State football defensive coach, were based on repressed memories” (Pendergrast, location 340, Introduction).
The craze now operates under different names and usually beneath the headlines, although gender politics and political correctness stand out front.
* “These therapists—copying the master Freud but lacking his genius—called to mind the 16th century Mannerist sculptors and painters who, imitating the earlier masters without their inspiration or skill, produced crude and grotesque works” (McHugh, p. 34).
** The concept of repression for many years has been discredited in the minds of most psychologists, and the repressed memory craze only increased distrust of it.
Repression, however, is about emotions and its aim is to mute them by blocking awareness of their underlying evaluations. Repression begins consciously, by giving a standing order “I don’t want to feel that,” which in terms of practical effectiveness means “don’t be aware of the underlying evaluation.” (Emotions are attached to the evaluation as automatic responses; emotions per se cannot be repressed. It is the blocked evaluation that diminishes or prevents our feeling of the emotion.) Eventually, a habit becomes established preventing us from experiencing an emotion, sometimes many emotions. Repression is neither amnesia, nor forgetting, and has little if anything to do with memory. See Edith Packer, Lectures on Psychology, pp. 188-92.
In the absence of brain damage or other physiological causes, traumatic events are not forgotten, nor are they repressed.
Showing posts with label psychiatry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychiatry. Show all posts
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Friday, December 07, 2012
“Men of Hard Science” and the Denial of Animal Emotions
In a previous post about psychiatry I put the phrase “men of hard science” in scare quotes to contrast these alleged experts with the more sensible and scientific kindness movement of nineteenth century mental health. In all fields, the “hard science” culture, which today of course includes some women, gospelizes philosophical materialism and the “if it’s not quantitative, it’s not scientific” approach to intellectual rigor.
It also preaches that ascribing human traits, such as consciousness, thoughts, or emotions, to the likes of dogs and cats is unscientific anthropomorphism, because materialism precludes the use of such terms when describing animal (or human) behavior. And “anthropomorphism” is used as a club to disparage anyone who uses such language.
Jeffrey Masson, Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst* turned bestselling author of books on the emotional life of animals, challenges the “hard science” approach to biology. Indeed, he points out in When Elephants Weep (p. 33) that women for many years were considered by their male colleagues to be too emotional, and therefore more likely to be anthropomorphic, to work directly with animals.
Yet none other than Charles Darwin and, more recently, Donald Griffin and Jane Goodall have championed the scientific study of animal consciousness and Goodall (Elephants, p. 3) has defended anecdotal evidence, that scorned lay technique “hard scientists” would never touch.**
The anthropomorphism charge stems from our alleged inability to know “with certainty” what goes on inside an animal mind. We don’t even know, the hard scientists say, if animals feel pain when they are being shocked or locked in isolation from all other animals and humans.
But it is an unjustified leap to conclude that we can know nothing about the contents of an animal’s consciousness and therefore require all descriptions of behavior to be mere responses to external stimuli. For example, if a lay person were to say that a dog is feeling left out and wants attention, the “proper” scientific jargon of hard science would be: the dog “is performing the submissive display of a low-ranking canid” (Elephants, p. 31).
Behavioristic reasoning such as this can be pushed to a solipsistic extreme by saying that all we can really know with certainty is the contents of our own mind, not that of other human beings or animals. And torture of humans, which fortunately no hard scientist today would agree to, can be justified on grounds that no one can know with certainty whether the victim is really feeling pain when whipped and stretched on the rack (Elephants, p. 39).
The term “with certainty” above is in scare quotes because it is both a redundancy and an equivocation; probable knowledge, which we can obtain by observing and interacting with animals, is a percentage of certainty, so any knowledge we have is certain knowledge, just not one hundred percent certain. To know anything, even as a probability, is to know it with certainty.
And one of those interesting ironies of probable knowledge, Masson points out, is that animals may sometimes be zoomorphic in relation to their human companions, such as the cat that deposits a tasty morsel of gopher innard under the lady of the house’s desk (Elephants, p. 44).
The bottom line of the anthropomorphism argument is not that some people improperly ascribe human qualities to animals. It is the contradiction and hypocrisy of the “hard scientists” who use animals to test hypotheses about human pain and depression (Dogs Never Lie about Love, p. 20). And more significantly, but not surprising to those who work in the academic world, it is the cowardice of those scientists who secretly believe that animals have emotions, but will never say so in their published work and may even criticize those who do (Never Lie, p. 17). Courage and “hard science” do not necessarily go together.
The further contradiction of the hard scientists—and tragedy and disgrace—is their failure to examine and acknowledge the similarities the human animal shares with its lower brethren. It is this failure that allowed mad doctors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe the insane as wild beasts and, as a result, chain and beat them because animals were assumed not to feel pain.
Little progress, unfortunately, has been made today among the “men of hard science.”
* Masson became director of the Freud Archives in 1980. While in that position he discovered unpublished letters that shed light on Freud’s repudiation of his 1890’s seduction theory. Masson subsequently wrote The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory, arguing that Freud lacked moral courage to stand up to professional indifference and cultural hostility to his claims of sexual abuse as the cause of patient hysteria. Children at the time were viewed as considerable distorters of the truth and respectable males, especially fathers, were beyond reproach. Masson’s payment for his courage and independence to publish these letters and his book was to be fired from his job and dismissed from all psychoanalytic societies.
** The validity of anecdotal evidence in science rests on the assumption that universals exist. A good scientist using sound epistemology needs only two or three observations, not a probabilistic sample of 500, to make a generalization. See In Defense of Advertising, pp. 153-58.
It also preaches that ascribing human traits, such as consciousness, thoughts, or emotions, to the likes of dogs and cats is unscientific anthropomorphism, because materialism precludes the use of such terms when describing animal (or human) behavior. And “anthropomorphism” is used as a club to disparage anyone who uses such language.
Jeffrey Masson, Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst* turned bestselling author of books on the emotional life of animals, challenges the “hard science” approach to biology. Indeed, he points out in When Elephants Weep (p. 33) that women for many years were considered by their male colleagues to be too emotional, and therefore more likely to be anthropomorphic, to work directly with animals.
Yet none other than Charles Darwin and, more recently, Donald Griffin and Jane Goodall have championed the scientific study of animal consciousness and Goodall (Elephants, p. 3) has defended anecdotal evidence, that scorned lay technique “hard scientists” would never touch.**
The anthropomorphism charge stems from our alleged inability to know “with certainty” what goes on inside an animal mind. We don’t even know, the hard scientists say, if animals feel pain when they are being shocked or locked in isolation from all other animals and humans.
But it is an unjustified leap to conclude that we can know nothing about the contents of an animal’s consciousness and therefore require all descriptions of behavior to be mere responses to external stimuli. For example, if a lay person were to say that a dog is feeling left out and wants attention, the “proper” scientific jargon of hard science would be: the dog “is performing the submissive display of a low-ranking canid” (Elephants, p. 31).
Behavioristic reasoning such as this can be pushed to a solipsistic extreme by saying that all we can really know with certainty is the contents of our own mind, not that of other human beings or animals. And torture of humans, which fortunately no hard scientist today would agree to, can be justified on grounds that no one can know with certainty whether the victim is really feeling pain when whipped and stretched on the rack (Elephants, p. 39).
The term “with certainty” above is in scare quotes because it is both a redundancy and an equivocation; probable knowledge, which we can obtain by observing and interacting with animals, is a percentage of certainty, so any knowledge we have is certain knowledge, just not one hundred percent certain. To know anything, even as a probability, is to know it with certainty.
And one of those interesting ironies of probable knowledge, Masson points out, is that animals may sometimes be zoomorphic in relation to their human companions, such as the cat that deposits a tasty morsel of gopher innard under the lady of the house’s desk (Elephants, p. 44).
The bottom line of the anthropomorphism argument is not that some people improperly ascribe human qualities to animals. It is the contradiction and hypocrisy of the “hard scientists” who use animals to test hypotheses about human pain and depression (Dogs Never Lie about Love, p. 20). And more significantly, but not surprising to those who work in the academic world, it is the cowardice of those scientists who secretly believe that animals have emotions, but will never say so in their published work and may even criticize those who do (Never Lie, p. 17). Courage and “hard science” do not necessarily go together.
The further contradiction of the hard scientists—and tragedy and disgrace—is their failure to examine and acknowledge the similarities the human animal shares with its lower brethren. It is this failure that allowed mad doctors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe the insane as wild beasts and, as a result, chain and beat them because animals were assumed not to feel pain.
Little progress, unfortunately, has been made today among the “men of hard science.”
* Masson became director of the Freud Archives in 1980. While in that position he discovered unpublished letters that shed light on Freud’s repudiation of his 1890’s seduction theory. Masson subsequently wrote The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory, arguing that Freud lacked moral courage to stand up to professional indifference and cultural hostility to his claims of sexual abuse as the cause of patient hysteria. Children at the time were viewed as considerable distorters of the truth and respectable males, especially fathers, were beyond reproach. Masson’s payment for his courage and independence to publish these letters and his book was to be fired from his job and dismissed from all psychoanalytic societies.
** The validity of anecdotal evidence in science rests on the assumption that universals exist. A good scientist using sound epistemology needs only two or three observations, not a probabilistic sample of 500, to make a generalization. See In Defense of Advertising, pp. 153-58.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
The Science Isn’t There
In my December 2011 post on “Nutrition and the Argument from Uncertainty” I cited and applauded the work of science writer Gary Taubes for unearthing the truth about nutrition science. The upshot was that the science just isn’t there for the conventional wisdom recommending a low fat diet and lots of exercise to protect us against obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. The science instead shows sugars and starches to be the most likely villains.
In a remarkable similarity of investigative journalism, science writer Robert Whitaker, in Anatomy of an Epidemic, demonstrates that the science isn’t there either for the chemical imbalance theory of biopsychiatry. In fact, the evidence in the psychiatric profession’s own literature shows that drug usage for depression, anxiety, and so-called schizophrenia causes more harm than help. In place of a genetic or chemical imbalance theory, Whitaker cites numerous studies supporting psychosocial issues as the causes of psychological problems and psychosocial treatment as the preferred technique to help victims of such problems improve.
To begin the presentation of Whittaker’s argument, let me repeat a point from last month’s post in which I reviewed his earlier work Mad in America: in the pre-drug era of the 1930s and ‘40s analysis of 1400 autopsied brains found no differences between the normal and the psychotic. Given this statement as a sort of prelude, what does Whittaker’s new book say about the chemical imbalance theory?
The theory for both depression and schizophrenia, as it has been tendered by the psychiatric profession, is quite simple. For depression, there is too little serotonin in the brain; for schizophrenia, there is too much dopamine. The drugs, therefore, according to the theory, should increase serotonin to combat depression and reduce dopamine to treat schizophrenia. Measurement of these neurotransmitters in cerebrospinal fluid is the benchmark for both existence and cure of alleged chemical imbalances.
What does the science show? For depression (pp. 71-75 in Whittaker*):
A comparable pattern occurred in the studies of schizophrenia (pp. 75-79):
How do the psychotropic drugs work? They “create perturbations in neurotransmitter functions.” The brain tries to compensate by doing the opposite of what the drug is striving to do. After a few weeks, the attempts at adaptation break down. The brain becomes “qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state.” Steve Hyman, American Journal of Psychiatry (1996). The drugs, in other words, make the brain abnormal. [Whittaker, pp. 83-84]
The drugs also worsen long-term outcomes. In schizophrenics relapse rates of psychosis increase when neuroleptics are stopped. When on the drug, the brain becomes supersensitive to dopamine, furiously trying to produce more. Upon sudden drug withdrawal, out-of-control, rapid firing of dopaminergic neurons in both the basal ganglia and limbic areas of the brain produce tics, agitation (sometimes leading to thoughts of violence or suicide), and psychotic relapse. The drug then must be brought back. Continued long-term use, however, at some point makes the wild firing of neurons irreversible. Tardive dyskinesia, frontal lobe shrinkage, and permanent psychosis result. (Guy Chouinard, physician, McGill University, in various psychiatric journals 1978-1991). [Whittaker, pp. 105-07]
Whittaker does not stop at depression and schizophrenia. He meticulously documents similarly flawed science and destructive outcomes of drugs for anxiety (the benzodiazepines, such as Valium and Xanax), bipolar disorder (Lithium), and so-called ADHD (Ritalin and its relatives).
Evidence for psychosocial causes of mental illness and the effectiveness of psychosocial treatment?
Bottom line: the science is not there for biopsychiatry. And the above is merely the tip of Whittaker’s iceberg of evidence.
The science is not there for biopsychiatry, just as it is not there for low fat diets. But nor is it there for zero-rate interest and “quantitative easing” in economics as cure of our current Great Recession. What bothers me in particular about psychiatry is the immediate and concrete self-evidence that the drugs cause harm, such as flattened affect, subdued behavior, and the appearance in patients of looking and acting drugged.
One can argue that economic thinking is abstract and the chains of reasoning long. Therefore, failure to understand its arguments may be excused (despite the harm caused by the boom/bust cycle of the 2000’s). But psychiatry, where the effects of the practitioners’ actions are immediately evident? Where the effects of a legal drug show little difference from the effects of an illegal one? That I do not understand.
Whittaker has performed profound service to science by writing Anatomy of an Epidemic. As with the work of Gary Taubes, I urge you to read Robert Whittaker for the science he has uncovered, for the meticulousness of his method, that is, for his epistemology, and for his courage to expose a profession that refuses to examine itself.
*Page references are to Whittaker. Full journal citations are in Whittaker’s notes. For a concise, bullet-point presentation of source documents in both of Whittaker’s books, see this web page.
In a remarkable similarity of investigative journalism, science writer Robert Whitaker, in Anatomy of an Epidemic, demonstrates that the science isn’t there either for the chemical imbalance theory of biopsychiatry. In fact, the evidence in the psychiatric profession’s own literature shows that drug usage for depression, anxiety, and so-called schizophrenia causes more harm than help. In place of a genetic or chemical imbalance theory, Whitaker cites numerous studies supporting psychosocial issues as the causes of psychological problems and psychosocial treatment as the preferred technique to help victims of such problems improve.
To begin the presentation of Whittaker’s argument, let me repeat a point from last month’s post in which I reviewed his earlier work Mad in America: in the pre-drug era of the 1930s and ‘40s analysis of 1400 autopsied brains found no differences between the normal and the psychotic. Given this statement as a sort of prelude, what does Whittaker’s new book say about the chemical imbalance theory?
The theory for both depression and schizophrenia, as it has been tendered by the psychiatric profession, is quite simple. For depression, there is too little serotonin in the brain; for schizophrenia, there is too much dopamine. The drugs, therefore, according to the theory, should increase serotonin to combat depression and reduce dopamine to treat schizophrenia. Measurement of these neurotransmitters in cerebrospinal fluid is the benchmark for both existence and cure of alleged chemical imbalances.
What does the science show? For depression (pp. 71-75 in Whittaker*):
- Studies in 1969 and 1971 revealed no significant difference between serotonin levels of normal and depressed subjects.
- In 1974, serotonin levels were normal for unmedicated depressives.
- Similar results were found repeatedly in subsequent years, leading to this statement (in PLoS Medicine, 2005) by Stanford psychiatrist David Burns: “I spent the first several years of my career doing full-time research on brain serotonin metabolism, but I never saw any convincing evidence that any psychiatric disorder, including depression, results from a deficiency of brain serotonin.”
- And this pointed conclusion by psychiatrist David Healy (in a PLoS Medicine news release, 2005): “The serotonin theory of depression is comparable to the masturbatory theory of insanity.”
A comparable pattern occurred in the studies of schizophrenia (pp. 75-79):
- No difference between normal and schizophrenic dopamine levels (1974) and no abnormal level of dopamine in unmedicated schizophrenics (1982).
- Similar results were found repeatedly in subsequent years, leading Steve Hyman, neuroscientist, former National Institute of Mental Health director and former provost of Harvard University, to conclude: “There is no compelling evidence that a lesion in the dopamine system is a primary cause of schizophrenia” (in Molecular Neuropharmacology, 2002).
- And: “The evidence does not support any of the biochemical theories of mental illness.” Elliot Valenstein, U. of Michigan neuroscientist, in Blaming the Brain (1998).
How do the psychotropic drugs work? They “create perturbations in neurotransmitter functions.” The brain tries to compensate by doing the opposite of what the drug is striving to do. After a few weeks, the attempts at adaptation break down. The brain becomes “qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state.” Steve Hyman, American Journal of Psychiatry (1996). The drugs, in other words, make the brain abnormal. [Whittaker, pp. 83-84]
The drugs also worsen long-term outcomes. In schizophrenics relapse rates of psychosis increase when neuroleptics are stopped. When on the drug, the brain becomes supersensitive to dopamine, furiously trying to produce more. Upon sudden drug withdrawal, out-of-control, rapid firing of dopaminergic neurons in both the basal ganglia and limbic areas of the brain produce tics, agitation (sometimes leading to thoughts of violence or suicide), and psychotic relapse. The drug then must be brought back. Continued long-term use, however, at some point makes the wild firing of neurons irreversible. Tardive dyskinesia, frontal lobe shrinkage, and permanent psychosis result. (Guy Chouinard, physician, McGill University, in various psychiatric journals 1978-1991). [Whittaker, pp. 105-07]
Whittaker does not stop at depression and schizophrenia. He meticulously documents similarly flawed science and destructive outcomes of drugs for anxiety (the benzodiazepines, such as Valium and Xanax), bipolar disorder (Lithium), and so-called ADHD (Ritalin and its relatives).
Evidence for psychosocial causes of mental illness and the effectiveness of psychosocial treatment?
- World Health Organization cross-cultural studies in 1969, 1978, 1997 have shown that medicated schizophrenic patients in the US and five other developed countries fared much more poorly—short term and long term—than the mostly unmedicated patients in India, Nigeria, and Columbia. [Whittaker, pp. 110-11]
- In the pre-drug era, the majority of first episode schizophrenics were dismissed from their hospitals within a year, 50 percent as cured, 30 percent as relieved. Twenty percent or fewer needed continual hospitalization. Today, the recovery rate is 36 percent and patients over a ten-year period require three times as many hospitalizations as their counterparts a century ago. The mentally ill die 15-25 years earlier than normal and their death rate has dramatically increased in the last 15 years. [Whittaker, p. 335]
- In Tornio, Finland (western Lapland), “open-dialogue” family-centered therapy has reduced first-episode schizophrenia by 90% since the 1980s. Psychotic symptoms often retreat within a month. Drugs are seldom used; if necessary, they are used in modest dosages and short term. One ward of the hospital is empty because schizophrenia is disappearing from the region! (More here: 1, 2, 3). [Whittaker, pp. 336-44]
Bottom line: the science is not there for biopsychiatry. And the above is merely the tip of Whittaker’s iceberg of evidence.
The science is not there for biopsychiatry, just as it is not there for low fat diets. But nor is it there for zero-rate interest and “quantitative easing” in economics as cure of our current Great Recession. What bothers me in particular about psychiatry is the immediate and concrete self-evidence that the drugs cause harm, such as flattened affect, subdued behavior, and the appearance in patients of looking and acting drugged.
One can argue that economic thinking is abstract and the chains of reasoning long. Therefore, failure to understand its arguments may be excused (despite the harm caused by the boom/bust cycle of the 2000’s). But psychiatry, where the effects of the practitioners’ actions are immediately evident? Where the effects of a legal drug show little difference from the effects of an illegal one? That I do not understand.
Whittaker has performed profound service to science by writing Anatomy of an Epidemic. As with the work of Gary Taubes, I urge you to read Robert Whittaker for the science he has uncovered, for the meticulousness of his method, that is, for his epistemology, and for his courage to expose a profession that refuses to examine itself.
*Page references are to Whittaker. Full journal citations are in Whittaker’s notes. For a concise, bullet-point presentation of source documents in both of Whittaker’s books, see this web page.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Kindness versus “Hard Science”
In my previous post I cited Peter Breggin’s Toxic Psychiatry as evidence to call modern psychiatric medical science both dictatorial and devastatingly harmful. Robert Whitaker’s very readable 2002 book Mad in America provides a great deal more detail about how the insane have been cared for in US history.
In the eighteenth century, for example, the insane were not considered human; they were wild beasts that had to be tamed. Hence the prison-like atmosphere, restraints and beatings, the blood-letting, the spinning chair, the dunking in water to the point of nearly drowning, and the administration of powerful emetics. These techniques were used repeatedly, day after day, sometimes for months. The aim of the mad-doctors, as psychiatrists were called prior to the late nineteenth century, was to terrorize patients, to break their will and supposedly knock the insanity out of them.
The twentieth century, as I mentioned in last month’s post, had its eugenics episode, and it is chronicled in detail by Whitaker, but the century also gave us shock therapies: insulin-coma, metrazol (camphor), and electro-convulsive. Administered perhaps hundreds of times, the purpose was to induce seizure, to supposedly shock the delusions and hallucinations out of patients. “Brain-damaging therapeutics” (Whitaker, p. 96), as these techniques were called, produced effects similar to brain trauma.
Transorbital lobotomy, performed with ice picks in the 1940s by the flamboyant Walter Freeman,* was called “surgically induced childhood” (p. 122). And because masturbation was still believed to be a cause of insanity, clitoridectomy was performed until 1950 (p. 79). In 1954 the drug era then began with the introduction of Thorazine.
But what happened in the nineteenth century? To be sure, many of the same cruel and inhumane techniques continued to be used. The Quakers, however, had a better idea, one that spawned the “moral treatment” movement in mental health (pp. 30-38). Recognizing that mental illness was not physiological, that it resulted from being overwhelmed by certain life events, they insisted that kindness, attention, listening, and talking were key to helping the mentally ill.
Fed well and allowed to sew, garden, read, write, and play games, the patients in the Pennsylvania Hospital that opened outside of Philadelphia in 1841 enjoyed a “pastoral comfort.” The hospital included a dining room, a greenhouse, a library, and a museum. The patients were encouraged to develop friendships, dress well, and rethink their behavior. They were urged to exercise free will and, not unlike Glasser’s Choice Theory, choose to be sane. Needless to say, they were neither chained nor beaten.
By 1890 all trace of moral treatment of the mentally ill was gone. The explosive growth of state-run, i.e., bureaucratic, hospitals made it impossible to train attendants in the spirit of kindness and empathy. What really killed moral treatment, though, was the ridicule and condescension put forth by medical doctors, especially the neurologists. They all considered themselves to be “men of hard science” and the moral treatment advocates were just old-fashioned, religious “gardeners and farmers” (p. 37). In the name of science straitjackets and cruelty were brought back; kindness and empathy were out.
The short-lived pastoral comfort of moral treatment brings to mind the “one brief shining moment” phrase from the title song in Camelot. Somewhat similar to King Arthur’s humanitarian moment in legendary history, moral treatment was eclipsed. It was stamped out by “hard science.”
Robert Whittaker is an award-winning investigative journalist. Before writing Mad in America, he subscribed to the conventional wisdom that psychiatry, especially the use of modern neuroleptic drugs, was good for the mentally ill. That is, until he stumbled on “symptom-exacerbation” experiments, conducted well into the 1990s, in which psychiatric researchers were giving patients drugs (such as ketamine, chemical cousin of angel dust) in order to worsen their psychotic symptoms. After this discovery, Whitaker in earnest began researching his book.
Psychiatric reviewers of Mad in America, not surprisingly, were unhappy campers. The reviews in fact were so negative that Whitaker’s editor advised him, if he wanted to make a living as a writer, to stay away from the field of psychiatry. He did so for awhile, writing two unrelated books, but psychiatric survivor groups kept contacting him. As a result in 2010 he wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic, the story behind the tripling of mental health disabilities from 1987-2007—this tripling despite increased usage of the alleged miracle drugs.
I have not yet read Whitaker’s latest book, but in a podcast interview about it with Peter Breggin, Whitaker relates three attempts by the psychiatric profession to silence him with ad hominem attacks and character assassinations. Here’s his response to one of the attempts. The profession, he stated in the interview, has succeeded in keeping him out of magazines where he used to write regularly.
This is how privileged “men of hard science” react when their monopoly and livelihood are threatened by facts. Fortunately, Whitaker has had the courage and independence to press on.
Many years ago William Glasser was denied a position at UCLA because he refused to buy into the medical model. In the 1980s Peter Breggin was threatened with having his license revoked because of comments he made on an Oprah Winfrey television show. (He won his case in court.) From outside the psychiatric establishment, Whitaker now joins this admirable pair.
Gentlemen, I raise a glass to you.
*It is worth noting that prior to taking up the ice pick, Freeman analyzed 1400 autopsied brains and found no differences between the normal and the schizophrenic (p. 115).
Postscript. One of the many tragic ironies in the history of science is the story of Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered the significance of and recommended—futilely in his lifetime—the use of antiseptic procedures in childbirth.
Semmelweis died a brutal death in an insane asylum.
Suffering in 1865 either from a breakdown because none of the “men of hard science” would listen to him or from Alzheimer’s disease or from syphilis, he was deceptively lured to a mental hospital. When he tried to leave, he was severely beaten, put in a straitjacket in a dark cell, doused with cold water, and given castor oil. Two weeks later he died . . . of septicemia, or blood poisoning, which he had argued was the cause of childbed fever and that the poisoning could readily have been prevented by washing the hands with chlorine.
In the eighteenth century, for example, the insane were not considered human; they were wild beasts that had to be tamed. Hence the prison-like atmosphere, restraints and beatings, the blood-letting, the spinning chair, the dunking in water to the point of nearly drowning, and the administration of powerful emetics. These techniques were used repeatedly, day after day, sometimes for months. The aim of the mad-doctors, as psychiatrists were called prior to the late nineteenth century, was to terrorize patients, to break their will and supposedly knock the insanity out of them.
The twentieth century, as I mentioned in last month’s post, had its eugenics episode, and it is chronicled in detail by Whitaker, but the century also gave us shock therapies: insulin-coma, metrazol (camphor), and electro-convulsive. Administered perhaps hundreds of times, the purpose was to induce seizure, to supposedly shock the delusions and hallucinations out of patients. “Brain-damaging therapeutics” (Whitaker, p. 96), as these techniques were called, produced effects similar to brain trauma.
Transorbital lobotomy, performed with ice picks in the 1940s by the flamboyant Walter Freeman,* was called “surgically induced childhood” (p. 122). And because masturbation was still believed to be a cause of insanity, clitoridectomy was performed until 1950 (p. 79). In 1954 the drug era then began with the introduction of Thorazine.
But what happened in the nineteenth century? To be sure, many of the same cruel and inhumane techniques continued to be used. The Quakers, however, had a better idea, one that spawned the “moral treatment” movement in mental health (pp. 30-38). Recognizing that mental illness was not physiological, that it resulted from being overwhelmed by certain life events, they insisted that kindness, attention, listening, and talking were key to helping the mentally ill.
Fed well and allowed to sew, garden, read, write, and play games, the patients in the Pennsylvania Hospital that opened outside of Philadelphia in 1841 enjoyed a “pastoral comfort.” The hospital included a dining room, a greenhouse, a library, and a museum. The patients were encouraged to develop friendships, dress well, and rethink their behavior. They were urged to exercise free will and, not unlike Glasser’s Choice Theory, choose to be sane. Needless to say, they were neither chained nor beaten.
By 1890 all trace of moral treatment of the mentally ill was gone. The explosive growth of state-run, i.e., bureaucratic, hospitals made it impossible to train attendants in the spirit of kindness and empathy. What really killed moral treatment, though, was the ridicule and condescension put forth by medical doctors, especially the neurologists. They all considered themselves to be “men of hard science” and the moral treatment advocates were just old-fashioned, religious “gardeners and farmers” (p. 37). In the name of science straitjackets and cruelty were brought back; kindness and empathy were out.
The short-lived pastoral comfort of moral treatment brings to mind the “one brief shining moment” phrase from the title song in Camelot. Somewhat similar to King Arthur’s humanitarian moment in legendary history, moral treatment was eclipsed. It was stamped out by “hard science.”
Robert Whittaker is an award-winning investigative journalist. Before writing Mad in America, he subscribed to the conventional wisdom that psychiatry, especially the use of modern neuroleptic drugs, was good for the mentally ill. That is, until he stumbled on “symptom-exacerbation” experiments, conducted well into the 1990s, in which psychiatric researchers were giving patients drugs (such as ketamine, chemical cousin of angel dust) in order to worsen their psychotic symptoms. After this discovery, Whitaker in earnest began researching his book.
Psychiatric reviewers of Mad in America, not surprisingly, were unhappy campers. The reviews in fact were so negative that Whitaker’s editor advised him, if he wanted to make a living as a writer, to stay away from the field of psychiatry. He did so for awhile, writing two unrelated books, but psychiatric survivor groups kept contacting him. As a result in 2010 he wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic, the story behind the tripling of mental health disabilities from 1987-2007—this tripling despite increased usage of the alleged miracle drugs.
I have not yet read Whitaker’s latest book, but in a podcast interview about it with Peter Breggin, Whitaker relates three attempts by the psychiatric profession to silence him with ad hominem attacks and character assassinations. Here’s his response to one of the attempts. The profession, he stated in the interview, has succeeded in keeping him out of magazines where he used to write regularly.
This is how privileged “men of hard science” react when their monopoly and livelihood are threatened by facts. Fortunately, Whitaker has had the courage and independence to press on.
Many years ago William Glasser was denied a position at UCLA because he refused to buy into the medical model. In the 1980s Peter Breggin was threatened with having his license revoked because of comments he made on an Oprah Winfrey television show. (He won his case in court.) From outside the psychiatric establishment, Whitaker now joins this admirable pair.
Gentlemen, I raise a glass to you.
*It is worth noting that prior to taking up the ice pick, Freeman analyzed 1400 autopsied brains and found no differences between the normal and the schizophrenic (p. 115).
Postscript. One of the many tragic ironies in the history of science is the story of Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered the significance of and recommended—futilely in his lifetime—the use of antiseptic procedures in childbirth.
Semmelweis died a brutal death in an insane asylum.
Suffering in 1865 either from a breakdown because none of the “men of hard science” would listen to him or from Alzheimer’s disease or from syphilis, he was deceptively lured to a mental hospital. When he tried to leave, he was severely beaten, put in a straitjacket in a dark cell, doused with cold water, and given castor oil. Two weeks later he died . . . of septicemia, or blood poisoning, which he had argued was the cause of childbed fever and that the poisoning could readily have been prevented by washing the hands with chlorine.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
The Barbarity of Modern Psychiatry
It is no accident that Thomas Hobbes—the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” guy—advocated dictatorship. He was a materialist, one who holds the philosophical notion that consciousness is an illusion, at best an effect or non-causal by-product of the brain. Materialism denies free will and therefore assumes that all of our behavior is determined either by internal bodily functions or by external environmental events. The mind plays no role in influencing behavior. To avoid living in a nasty, brutish, anarchical society, says Hobbes, we need a strong, controlling central government to tell us what to do.
Today, the field of psychiatry is dominated by the theory of materialism. As a result, most of its practitioners have no qualms about imprisoning people against their will, then equally forcibly giving them electro-convulsive shock treatments or neuroleptic (psychotropic) drugs or performing surgery on them. The coercion is considered good medical practice, made possible by the government-sanctioned licensing and patent monopolies, the government socialized and cartelized medical-insurance system, and the laws regulating state-run mental hospitals and wards. The effects of the treatments are not cures for so-called mental illness (“biochemical imbalances”). They amount to total control over unwanted behaviors and their ultimate consequences often are irreversible brain and body damage.
The story is exhaustively documented in Peter Breggin’s 1991 book Toxic Psychiatry.* The culprit is the “medical model” that says psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, and paranoia are physiologically based and must be treated medically, with electroshock, drugs, or surgery. Yes, psychosurgery of the Ken Kesey type is still practiced today in the twenty-first century. Courses on psychotherapy, Breggin points out, are no longer taught in most medical schools that train psychiatrists. The outrage of it all, he demonstrates, is that there is no scientifically valid evidence for the physiological cause of any of these problems.
In page after page, chapter after chapter, Breggin cites researchers, many of them psychiatrists, who acknowledge that no causal connection has been demonstrated between brain physiology and psychological problems. Quite the contrary, evidence of brain damage due to electroshock, drugs, and surgery is abundant. For example, tardive dyskinesia and brain shrinkage are two common effects of the typical “treatments.” The terms “chemical straitjacket” and “chemical lobotomy” are used to characterize the results of some drug use and the immediate, short-term effect of drugs (and shock and surgery) is described as “blunting the personality,” “flattened affect,” and “subdued behavior.” The patients, in other words, look and act drugged. (More here and here.)
The treatments are instruments of restraint, especially of the hyperactive type of behavior that may occur in prisons and mental wards . . . and in schools.
Yet, as William Glasser says, so-called schizophrenics are “just lonely people.” And, as Breggin concurs, the root of the problems most often is family abuse (verbal and physical) or neglect.** The solution is Carl Rogers’ “unconditional positive regard” and nurturing talk therapy. Safe houses run by uncredentialed amateurs, psychiatric survivors in some cases, produce far better results for schizophrenics than any of the shocks, drugs or surgeries of psychiatrists.
Why do establishment psychiatrists persist in using the medical model when the evidence against it continues to pile up? Materialism, of course, is no small theory that blinds them to the contents of consciousness and possible psychosocial causes of mental stress. As academic researchers, some do what other academics have been known to do when discovering embarrassing facts: they bury them in tiny footnotes (all found by Breggin) or relegate their confessions and cautions to post-research interviews (all again found by Breggin) long after the headlines of supposed drug success have played out in the press. And then there’s the blatant conflict of interest, acknowledged by too few psychiatrists, of the millions of pharmaceutical company dollars that are fed to the profession.
“Modern psychiatry,” as Breggin puts it, “is not about counseling and empowering people. It's about controlling and suppressing them.” Its history dates to the seventeenth century but its tactics too often over the years have been those of the Inquisition: subjugating “behaviours unacceptable or inconvenient to those in power” (Models of Madness, p. 14). Mental hospitals of the nineteenth century, and even of the twentieth, have been called snake pits; inmates then, and still today, were and are treated as objects, not people with problems to be resolved.
Consider the eugenics programs of the 1920s and ‘30s in both the United States and Nazi Germany. Both were promoted in the name of science by psychiatrists; hundreds of thousands of people were sterilized or killed during that time and the death houses of the Nazi psychiatrists became the models of concentration camp gas chambers (1, 2). (In the United States compulsory sterilizations continued well into the 1960s.) And let us not forget the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, the incarceration of political dissenters. Abuse? Yes. Surprising? No, given the philosophical premise of materialism. (And China?)
Consider also the 1992 federal Violence Initiative of the National Institute of Mental Health. It proposed psychiatric interventions to identify and treat children allegedly biologically and genetically predisposed to violence. Presumably the targeted children would have been treated with drugs. Because there is no evidence whatsoever of a genetic connection to crime or violence and because most victims and perpetrators of violence in the United States today are African Americans, accusations of racism quickly quashed the plan (1, 2, 3, 4).
But again, this is what materialism can lead to. Total domination. Consciousness is irrelevant. Psychosocial causes of behavior are only an illusion.
Thomas Szasz likened the questionable science of modern psychiatry to alchemy and astrology. Perhaps it should be called totalitarian science.
* In the twenty-one years since the publication of Toxic Psychiatry, evidence against the shock-drug-cut approach to helping distressed people has only increased. See Breggin’s web site for detail.
** Glasser and Breggin, both psychiatrists who heroically stand up to the authoritarianism of the profession, are not the only practitioners who talk and work in this manner to help so-called schizophrenics. See, for example, the authors of Models of Madness. Chapter 5 explains why I keep saying “so-called” about schizophrenia; John Read argues that it is an invalid concept.
Today, the field of psychiatry is dominated by the theory of materialism. As a result, most of its practitioners have no qualms about imprisoning people against their will, then equally forcibly giving them electro-convulsive shock treatments or neuroleptic (psychotropic) drugs or performing surgery on them. The coercion is considered good medical practice, made possible by the government-sanctioned licensing and patent monopolies, the government socialized and cartelized medical-insurance system, and the laws regulating state-run mental hospitals and wards. The effects of the treatments are not cures for so-called mental illness (“biochemical imbalances”). They amount to total control over unwanted behaviors and their ultimate consequences often are irreversible brain and body damage.
The story is exhaustively documented in Peter Breggin’s 1991 book Toxic Psychiatry.* The culprit is the “medical model” that says psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, and paranoia are physiologically based and must be treated medically, with electroshock, drugs, or surgery. Yes, psychosurgery of the Ken Kesey type is still practiced today in the twenty-first century. Courses on psychotherapy, Breggin points out, are no longer taught in most medical schools that train psychiatrists. The outrage of it all, he demonstrates, is that there is no scientifically valid evidence for the physiological cause of any of these problems.
In page after page, chapter after chapter, Breggin cites researchers, many of them psychiatrists, who acknowledge that no causal connection has been demonstrated between brain physiology and psychological problems. Quite the contrary, evidence of brain damage due to electroshock, drugs, and surgery is abundant. For example, tardive dyskinesia and brain shrinkage are two common effects of the typical “treatments.” The terms “chemical straitjacket” and “chemical lobotomy” are used to characterize the results of some drug use and the immediate, short-term effect of drugs (and shock and surgery) is described as “blunting the personality,” “flattened affect,” and “subdued behavior.” The patients, in other words, look and act drugged. (More here and here.)
The treatments are instruments of restraint, especially of the hyperactive type of behavior that may occur in prisons and mental wards . . . and in schools.
Yet, as William Glasser says, so-called schizophrenics are “just lonely people.” And, as Breggin concurs, the root of the problems most often is family abuse (verbal and physical) or neglect.** The solution is Carl Rogers’ “unconditional positive regard” and nurturing talk therapy. Safe houses run by uncredentialed amateurs, psychiatric survivors in some cases, produce far better results for schizophrenics than any of the shocks, drugs or surgeries of psychiatrists.
Why do establishment psychiatrists persist in using the medical model when the evidence against it continues to pile up? Materialism, of course, is no small theory that blinds them to the contents of consciousness and possible psychosocial causes of mental stress. As academic researchers, some do what other academics have been known to do when discovering embarrassing facts: they bury them in tiny footnotes (all found by Breggin) or relegate their confessions and cautions to post-research interviews (all again found by Breggin) long after the headlines of supposed drug success have played out in the press. And then there’s the blatant conflict of interest, acknowledged by too few psychiatrists, of the millions of pharmaceutical company dollars that are fed to the profession.
“Modern psychiatry,” as Breggin puts it, “is not about counseling and empowering people. It's about controlling and suppressing them.” Its history dates to the seventeenth century but its tactics too often over the years have been those of the Inquisition: subjugating “behaviours unacceptable or inconvenient to those in power” (Models of Madness, p. 14). Mental hospitals of the nineteenth century, and even of the twentieth, have been called snake pits; inmates then, and still today, were and are treated as objects, not people with problems to be resolved.
Consider the eugenics programs of the 1920s and ‘30s in both the United States and Nazi Germany. Both were promoted in the name of science by psychiatrists; hundreds of thousands of people were sterilized or killed during that time and the death houses of the Nazi psychiatrists became the models of concentration camp gas chambers (1, 2). (In the United States compulsory sterilizations continued well into the 1960s.) And let us not forget the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, the incarceration of political dissenters. Abuse? Yes. Surprising? No, given the philosophical premise of materialism. (And China?)
Consider also the 1992 federal Violence Initiative of the National Institute of Mental Health. It proposed psychiatric interventions to identify and treat children allegedly biologically and genetically predisposed to violence. Presumably the targeted children would have been treated with drugs. Because there is no evidence whatsoever of a genetic connection to crime or violence and because most victims and perpetrators of violence in the United States today are African Americans, accusations of racism quickly quashed the plan (1, 2, 3, 4).
But again, this is what materialism can lead to. Total domination. Consciousness is irrelevant. Psychosocial causes of behavior are only an illusion.
Thomas Szasz likened the questionable science of modern psychiatry to alchemy and astrology. Perhaps it should be called totalitarian science.
* In the twenty-one years since the publication of Toxic Psychiatry, evidence against the shock-drug-cut approach to helping distressed people has only increased. See Breggin’s web site for detail.
** Glasser and Breggin, both psychiatrists who heroically stand up to the authoritarianism of the profession, are not the only practitioners who talk and work in this manner to help so-called schizophrenics. See, for example, the authors of Models of Madness. Chapter 5 explains why I keep saying “so-called” about schizophrenia; John Read argues that it is an invalid concept.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
“Children Don’t Have Disorders; They Live in a Disordered World”
The title of this post comes from psychiatrist and attention-deficit/hyperactivity-disorder (ADHD) critic Peter Breggin. It’s a variation of Maria Montessori’s line to “control the environment, not the child.” For Montessori, children develop healthy psychologies—become “normalized,” to use her term—by being left free to pursue their own interests and choose their own educational work, provided the surroundings of the classroom are made safe and stimulating. Drugs are a cruel and totally unwarranted control of the child.
Most children who exhibit the well-known ADHD symptoms are simply failing to handle the boredom, confusion*, or authoritarianism, or all three, of school, home, and other environments in which they live and play. They are not diseased kids, possessing neurological or biochemical imbalances, who require addicting, cocaine-like stimulants to cow them into submission. They are youngsters trying to learn, and have fun in the process, but their world is complex and often the opposite of fun, especially school. What they desperately need is to be left free as much as possible to pursue their own interests and, when they request it, one or several adults to be their friends, to pay attention to them, to listen to their pleasures and worries, and to be their coach and confidant. What they most decidedly do not need are William Glasser’s seven deadly habits (p. 13): criticizing, blaming, complaining, nagging, threatening, punishing, and bribing. All of these habits, of course, are staples of their world—and ours, but many children do not know how to cope with them. What they also most definitely do not need is to be made to feel stoned or spaced out.
Labeling children with ADHD stigmatizes them as inadequate and, as a result, induces unearned guilt, because the adults who recommend the drugs are actually blaming them for their behavior even though the theory behind the whole psychotropic drug mantra is materialism and determinism. A child who acts up in class, or who does not pay attention, according to the adults, must be controlled. Something, so the adults say, is wrong with the child, not with the adults’ methods of relating to the child. The message is clear. Donna Bryant Goertz says that medication today is the new spanking.
The evidence for a physiological basis of ADHD behavior does not exist. The experimental studies do not uphold the belief. This is especially confirmed when the ADHD researchers themselves admit that the children improve during summer vacation and when taught in smaller, more attention-focused classes. Indeed, when looking at the psychiatric professions’ nine symptoms of inattention and the nine symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity, I can say that I have often exhibited everyone of them—today, when I was a child, and in all the years in between. I also know too many highly successful people, and have heard of many others, who, if the medicines had been available when they were children, would have been drugged to the hilt and probably had their futures destroyed.
The criteria to look at concerning ADHD are Glasser’s (p. 256)**: if your child can watch and understand television, play video games, and use a computer, do better for some teachers than for others, do better in one subject than another that requires the same level of reading and understanding, and has good friends he or she enjoys being with, then it is highly unlikely that there is anything wrong with your child. Glasser (click educational, last clip on the page) piercingly and humorously puts the issue in perspective when he says that the worst attention deficit disorders in the world are husbands and wives, because many of them so often do not listen to each other!
As I have said in these pages before, the solution to helping so-called problem children is to let them go fish. “Many are just plain bored of sitting at a desk in a classroom and are sick of having adults lord their size and power over them.” Going fishing, though literally possible at the Sudbury Valley School, is metaphor for getting adults off their backs and more generally for removing confusion and authoritarianism from their lives.
*I say “confusion” because some parents today who have rejected the authoritarianism of their parents and grandparents have nevertheless failed to provide structure and consistency for their children. Similar behavior can result. Some schools can also provide this confusion.
**I’ve simplified these criteria. See pp. 255-59 in Choice Theory for a fuller understanding of Glasser’s analysis of the so-called learning disabilities. Glasser calls psychotropic medicines “brain drugs,” refusing to grant them the honorific “medicines,” and refers to their side effects as effects. There’s nothing secondary or “side,” he says, about the effects of brain drugs.
Most children who exhibit the well-known ADHD symptoms are simply failing to handle the boredom, confusion*, or authoritarianism, or all three, of school, home, and other environments in which they live and play. They are not diseased kids, possessing neurological or biochemical imbalances, who require addicting, cocaine-like stimulants to cow them into submission. They are youngsters trying to learn, and have fun in the process, but their world is complex and often the opposite of fun, especially school. What they desperately need is to be left free as much as possible to pursue their own interests and, when they request it, one or several adults to be their friends, to pay attention to them, to listen to their pleasures and worries, and to be their coach and confidant. What they most decidedly do not need are William Glasser’s seven deadly habits (p. 13): criticizing, blaming, complaining, nagging, threatening, punishing, and bribing. All of these habits, of course, are staples of their world—and ours, but many children do not know how to cope with them. What they also most definitely do not need is to be made to feel stoned or spaced out.
Labeling children with ADHD stigmatizes them as inadequate and, as a result, induces unearned guilt, because the adults who recommend the drugs are actually blaming them for their behavior even though the theory behind the whole psychotropic drug mantra is materialism and determinism. A child who acts up in class, or who does not pay attention, according to the adults, must be controlled. Something, so the adults say, is wrong with the child, not with the adults’ methods of relating to the child. The message is clear. Donna Bryant Goertz says that medication today is the new spanking.
The evidence for a physiological basis of ADHD behavior does not exist. The experimental studies do not uphold the belief. This is especially confirmed when the ADHD researchers themselves admit that the children improve during summer vacation and when taught in smaller, more attention-focused classes. Indeed, when looking at the psychiatric professions’ nine symptoms of inattention and the nine symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity, I can say that I have often exhibited everyone of them—today, when I was a child, and in all the years in between. I also know too many highly successful people, and have heard of many others, who, if the medicines had been available when they were children, would have been drugged to the hilt and probably had their futures destroyed.
The criteria to look at concerning ADHD are Glasser’s (p. 256)**: if your child can watch and understand television, play video games, and use a computer, do better for some teachers than for others, do better in one subject than another that requires the same level of reading and understanding, and has good friends he or she enjoys being with, then it is highly unlikely that there is anything wrong with your child. Glasser (click educational, last clip on the page) piercingly and humorously puts the issue in perspective when he says that the worst attention deficit disorders in the world are husbands and wives, because many of them so often do not listen to each other!
As I have said in these pages before, the solution to helping so-called problem children is to let them go fish. “Many are just plain bored of sitting at a desk in a classroom and are sick of having adults lord their size and power over them.” Going fishing, though literally possible at the Sudbury Valley School, is metaphor for getting adults off their backs and more generally for removing confusion and authoritarianism from their lives.
*I say “confusion” because some parents today who have rejected the authoritarianism of their parents and grandparents have nevertheless failed to provide structure and consistency for their children. Similar behavior can result. Some schools can also provide this confusion.
**I’ve simplified these criteria. See pp. 255-59 in Choice Theory for a fuller understanding of Glasser’s analysis of the so-called learning disabilities. Glasser calls psychotropic medicines “brain drugs,” refusing to grant them the honorific “medicines,” and refers to their side effects as effects. There’s nothing secondary or “side,” he says, about the effects of brain drugs.
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