ADHD: Lazy Parenting and Famous Psychologist and Psychiatrist Call ADHD An Invention

Update at the bottom of the article.

As Spiegel reported  (or try this site with the same article) in an interview with famous Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan:

If anyone has the professional expertise and moral authority to compare psychology to a rotten piece of furniture, it is Kagan. A ranking of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century published by a group of US academics in 2002 put Kagan in 22nd place, even above Carl Jung (23rd), the founder of analytical psychology, and Ivan Pavlov (24th), who discovered the reflex bearing his name.

SPIEGEL: … you could also say skyrocketed. In the 1960s, mental disorders were virtually unknown among children. Today, official sources claim that one child in eight in the United States is mentally ill.

Kagan: That's true, but it is primarily due to fuzzy diagnostic practices. Let's go back 50 years. We have a 7-year-old child who is bored in school and disrupts classes. Back then, he was called lazy. Today, he is said to suffer from ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). That's why the numbers have soared.

SPIEGEL: Experts speak of 5.4 million American children who display the symptoms typical of ADHD. Are you saying that this mental disorder is just an invention?

Kagan: That's correct; it is an invention. Every child who's not doing well in school is sent to see a pediatrician, and the pediatrician says: "It's ADHD; here's Ritalin." In fact, 90 percent of these 5.4 million kids don't have an abnormal dopamine metabolism. The problem is, if a drug is available to doctors, they'll make the corresponding diagnosis.

SPIEGEL: So the alleged health crisis among children is actually nothing but a bugaboo?

Kagan: We could get philosophical and ask ourselves: "What does mental illness mean?" If you do interviews with children and adolescents aged 12 to 19, then 40 percent can be categorized as anxious or depressed. But if you take a closer look and ask how many of them are seriously impaired by this, the number shrinks to 8 percent. Describing every child who is depressed or anxious as being mentally ill is ridiculous. Adolescents are anxious, that's normal. They don't know what college to go to. Their boyfriend or girlfriend just stood them up. Being sad or anxious is just as much a part of life as anger or sexual frustration.

SPIEGEL: What does it mean if millions of American children are wrongly being declared mentally ill?

Kagan: Well, most of all, it means more money for the pharmaceutical industry and more money for psychiatrists and people doing research.

End quote.

This view, that a defintion of "mental illness" is a philosophical one is one of the main reasons why increasing numbers of psychiatrists are saying there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance. Rather it's a philosophical one of determining what is right or wrong behavior, etc. I reported on this here. The other issue is that there is no standard number for what is accepted as "good" or "bad" amounts of chemicals in one's brain.

Also to note: interviewing people by asking them to describe how they feel--even asking particular questions or phrasing them--both are done as well as the conclusion made based on these interviews---by subjective methods. It's all completely subjective. Remember--people feel differently from one day to the next, even one hour to the next depending upon a lot of various situations---diet, good news, bad news, quarrels, guilt, etc. 

Similarly is the report by Der Spiegel (translation edition)concerning the man who came up with ADHD and his renounciation:

Quote:

In the sixties it was then the U.S. psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg, who, under a new name, helped the disease to break through. In the evening the doctor played at home with his own children, during the day he took care of difficult students - and tried psychotropic drugs from them.Initially he experimented with dextroamphetamine, later he prescribed methylphenidate to break bread. And lo and behold: The means altered the behavior; spirited children were docile....

A look at the USA demonstrated that there is still room for improvement.Of the ten year-old boy now swallows every tenth already an ADHD medication - every day. But of all the scientific father of ADHD has followed the explosion of prescriptions with growing horror. Leon Eisenberg later took over the management of psychiatry at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and became one of the most famous neurologists in the world. In his last interview, seven months before his death from prostate cancer at the age of 87 years, he distanced himself from his youthful indiscretion.

...He never would have thought, he said that his invention would be so popular once. "ADHD is a prime example of a fabricated disease," Eisenberg said. "The genetic predisposition for ADHD is completely overrated."

Instead, child psychiatrist should more thoroughly investigate the psychosocial reasons that can lead to behavioral problems, Eisenberg said. Are there fights with parents, mother and father live together, there are problems in the family? Such questions are important but they are taking a lot of time, Eisenberg said, adding with a sigh: ". A pill prescribe other hand very quickly,"

*End quote.  

His answer to such a horror is to not turn to drugs but to see what is going on in the life of the child. For example, he suggested looking at the parents' marriage and if there's fighting between them or if they even live together, or if there are other problems within the family. This has been standard common sense for millennia.  No one is special when it comes to life's problems. We all must deal with various trials in our lives. That's called Life. Too bad it is so easily scoffed at and rejected. Let's face it: sin is common to every person, young or old. And that's really the bottom line.

And then there's this report by World Public Union which printed the article by Moritz Nestor over at Current Concerns,  which shows the direct link between the DSM IV panel members (they vote diagnoses in or out of the upcoming DSM) and the pharmacutical industry:

Quote:

Have such groups marketed the diagnosis of ADHD in the service of the pharmaceutical market and tailor-made for him with a lot of propaganda and public relations? It is this issue that the American psychologist Lisa Cosgrove and others investigated in their study Financial Ties between DSM-IV Panel Members and the Pharmaceutical Industry7. They found that “Of the 170 DSM panel members 95 (56%) had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. One hundred percent of the members of the panels on ‘Mood Disorders’ and ‘Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders’ had financial ties to drug companies. The connections are especially strong in those diagnostic areas where drugs are the first line of treatment for mental disorders.” In the next edition of the manual, the situation is unchanged. “Of the 137 DSM-V panel members who have posted disclosure statements, 56% have reported industry ties – no improvement over the percent of DSM-IV members.” “The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry,” said Dr Irwin Savodnik, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles...

The task of psychologists, educators and doctors is not to put children on the “chemical lead” because the entire society cannot handle the products of its misguided theories of man and raising children, and instead hands over our children to the free pharmaceutical market. Let us return to the basic matter of personal psychology and education: The child is to acquire personal responsibility and emphatic behavior under expert guidance – and that takes the family and the school: In these fields, the child should be able to lead off mentally. This constitutes the core of the human person.

End quote. 

It appears that they removed the article, but it looks like it was fully copied here.

That last paragraph I find interesting because although I reject psychology in all forms, they still have to admit, along with Eisenberg,  that psycholgy's and psychiatry's theories of man and raising children has failed and in actuality has led the way to using drugs to deal with life's issues. Instead they admit, we need to  teach  personal responsibility and right behavior.

***UPDATE***  October 22,2015

Even those studied that believe in ADHD's existance have found that it is reduced by 73% just by having the child stay an extra year at home. 

Quote:Stanford’s Graduate School of Education offered a news release about the new study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research titled, The Gift of Time? School Starting Age and Mental Health.
“We found that delaying kindergarten for one year reduced inattention and hyperactivity by 73 percent for an average child at age 11, and it virtually eliminated the probability that an average child at that age would have an ‘abnormal,’ or higher-than-normal rating for the inattentive-hyperactive behavioral measure.”

~ Stanford University

* For naysayers, Eisenberg's later career ended up battling the notion of medicalizing feelings (sounds like he was coming around to Thomas Szasz who said as much in 1955) and thus has become an industry about money and which is lucrative. See here and here.

In Eisenberg's last article, he says of Frank Jerome: 

"Frank recognized that psychotherapy outcomes were better than wait-list comparison groups but remarkably similar to one another despite differences in the theories and techniques to which therapists professed allegiance. He concluded that a number of non-specific psychologic processes were common to successful psychotherapy: an intense confiding relationship with a therapist; a set of explanations for the patient’s distress; suggested alternative ways of dealing with the identified problems; the arousal of hope; and the restoration of morale. His conclusion offended proponents of all the schools of psychotherapy."

And that is where the Creator OF our soul (psyche) should be consulted FIRST. This is where His Word and the local church with fellow (and true) Christians comes in. For it is the wisdom of God to address man's sin and wrong thoughts, show him what is true and pure and to think on those things (Phil. 4), to rebuke or correct, to give actual hope for the believer as he is led to look to Christ Jesus and sound doctrine, and thus as his mind is renewed, his behavior will follow that sound doctrine. 

Psa 1:1  How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, Nor stand in the path of sinners, Nor sit in the seat of scoffers! 

Psa 1:2  But his delight is in the law of the LORD, And in His law he meditates day and night. 

Psa 1:3  And he will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, Which yields its fruit in its season, And its leaf does not wither; And in whatever he does, he prospers. 

Eph 4:11  And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, 

Eph 4:12  for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; 

Eph 4:13  until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fulness of Christ. 

Eph 4:14  As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves, and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; 

Eph 4:15  but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him, who is the head, even Christ, 

Eisenberg then says, 

"In the last half of the 19th Century, progress in pathology and bacteriology uncovered the pathogenesis of many diseases; yet there was disappointingly little progress about mental disorders. ...

To the distress of neuropsychiatrists, dementia praecox and manic depressive psychosis continued to be impervious to laboratory research. Report after report of the discovery of histologic lesions in the brain proved to be as a result of artifacts. Neurochemistry was unsuccessful in manipulating brain cerebrosides and other insoluble tissue components. The failure of available methods to reveal pathologic changes in the brain in schizophrenia and manic depressive disease crystallized a belief that they were psychogenic. The paucity of evidence for an infectious etiology for schizophrenia did not stop many clinicians. Focal sepsis had its vogue in the 1920s with many patients losing teeth, uteri, and parts of their intestines as treatment for their schizophrenia (19)."