by Fred Baughman, MD

Re: "The Medication of Foster Children", PBS (video) January 7, 2011

Foster children are unfortunates without parents and families, not a medical population—not victims of a disease or epidemic. I would add here that increasingly, foster children are children “kidnapped” by government—by child protective services and family courts, their parents having had the audacity to resist the psychiatric labeling and drugging and having been charged with “medical neglect” for their audacity.

Like children in US public schools 10 to 15 percent of whom are psychiatrically labeled and drugged, foster children are medically, physically normal, having only emotional, educational, and social needs to be met. As of 2007, 5.4 million US schoolchildren were said to have so-called ADHD, the majority of them on addictive, dangerous, and deadly amphetamines stunting their growth, their brain size (denied by the manufacturers and their experts), causing psychoses leading to suicide and homicide, and a seven-fold increase in sudden cardiac death.

Pharmaceutical companies, professors (bought and paid for) in every medical school in the US, psychiatrists, practicing physicians of all kinds (pediatricians, neurologists, child neurologists, family practitioners), and carefully cultivated patient advocacy groups, invent diseases out of thin air, and grow them into epidemics and pandemics, all needing drugs, all getting drugs. Just to be sure, each new “patient” in this new age of medicine gets not one but several “disease” labels and with them not one but several drugs, so when there is a grave side effect or death the drug, still profitable, still on patent, is not besmirched, but can go on reaping billions annually as do the antipsychotics—drugs that are virtually unfit for human consumption but which are pushed to any and all by the FDA—no longer a protector of the people in any sense of the word.

Childhood “bipolar disorder,” non-existent in the mid-nineties, has ballooned, inexplicably, to 3-4 million in the US today, none with an objective physical abnormality by which to prove its presence, none with an abnormality to make normal—in this way no different than any other psychiatric label.

And what of “adult ADHD,” which has only risen in our midst within the past 2-3 years, already at 3-4 million. What incredible epidemics. We see no such growth of numbers in real diseases, some of which even disappear, as did polio with the Salk and Sabin vaccines. We see no such growth from year to year of diabetes, cancers or rates of pneumococcal meningitis, for example. Only in psychiatry.

There was no ADD or ADHD when I was in public school in the forties, and there was none when I graduated from medical school in 1960 or trained in neurology and child neurology in the early sixties. There were no “invented” diseases then. Big Pharma in league with psychiatry had not yet commandeered all of medicine, decreeing that all would be “ill,” “sick,” “chemically imbalanced” and in need of their drugs—if not this one, that one, if not one, two, seven, fifteen.

Look among the little children in foster care. Look among soldiers and veterans of the middle east conflicts, victims of required, ordered, mandated, psychiatric labeling and drugging. And they too are dying from these drugs for their “mental health” and psychiatric “disorders” none of which can be seen, felt, scanned or objectively proven. Who is immune?

Yes, the perversion of medicine is now, nearly complete. We need only look at the amoral, anti-scientific, targeting of foster children, not because they are ill, sick, or diseased in any medical sense, but because they are helpless and because, as Texas has shown us, they can be labeled and drugged with impunity. And yes, they “age-out” of foster care but do they ever escape the labels and drugs? It seems they do not.

Congress, the Senate and judiciary say nothing because they entertain the Big Pharma lobbying corps daily, passing “mental health” parity (declaring but never proving that mental illness equates to physical illness) and other such laws as are necessary to assure that our “mental health” (if no other kind of health care)--that which comes with their labeling and drugging--is available, by court order if need be, or whenever a psychiatrist utters “he or she is a danger to self and others.”

They target mainly, but not exclusively, the poor, minority, and disenfranchised among us, giving legal if not medical or scientific legitimacy to their for-profit labeling and drugging against which, once targeted, the “patient” has no legal recourse or protection. Persons enamored of psychology and psychiatry for themselves and their families are another group soon to find themselves in the psychiatric-pharmaceutical snare; soon to learn the hard way--when it is too late.

They await all of us. Their self serving “epidemiology” out of Harvard University has it that 55 percent of Americans suffer a serious mental illness at some time in their life [Weekly Standard, June 27, 2005]. All of us labeled and drugged are to be psychiatric “patients” in perpetuity.

In a 1976 slip of the tongue, Henry Gadsden, CEO of pharmaceutical giant, Merck, told Fortune magazine of his distress that their potential markets had been limited to sick people—people proven 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, he went on, Merck would be able to “sell to everyone.”

And so, it seems, Mr. Gadsden (and the rest of his industry), having perverted psychiatry and the rest of the medical profession, is, in 3 short decades, having his way with us.

-###-

Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter # 407

FRED A. BAUGHMAN, JR. M.D.*

NEUROLOGY AND CHILD NEUROLOGY (Board Certified)

FELLOW, AMERICAN ACADEMY OF NEUROLOGY
Author: The ADHD Fraud--How Psychiatry Makes “Patients” of Normal Children