psychiatry

*Dr. Thomas Szasz on psychiatry

When school authorities tell a mother, that her son is sick and needs to be on drugs, how in the world is she to know that, that is simply a lie. How is she to recognize that what experts now call "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)" is simple not a disease.  Now, such a mother is not an expert, in the history of psychiatry. She does not know that psychiatrist have, for hundreds of years, used diagnostic terms, so-called diagnostic terms, to stigmatize and control people. I will only give you a few dramatic examples. When Black slaves in the South ran away to freedom, it wasn't that they wanted to be free; they suffered from a disease called drapetomania-from drapetes, runaway slave, and mania. I am not making this up, just like Attention Deficit Disorder is. Women, half the population of mankind, of course, if they were foolish enough to rebel against domination by man, well, then they had a serious disease called hysteria, which was due to their wandering womb. Now, none of those behaviors was ever a disease, and, of course, is not a disease.  Nor is Attention Deficit Disorder a disease. No behavior, or misbehavior, is a disease or can be a disease. That's not what diseases are. So it doesn't matter how a child behaves. There is nothing to examine. If he is sick, then there must be some objective science to it, which can be diagnosed by physician and objective tests. That's why as soon as you go to a doctor, they take a lot of blood and take x-rays.  They don't want to hear how you behave. When I went to medical school, sixty years ago, there were only a handful of mental diseases. I think there were no more than six or seven. Now there are more than three hundred. And new ones are "discovered" every day. Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment. Diseases are malfunctions of the human body, of the heart, the liver, the kidney, the brain, and so forth. The task we set ourselves, to combat psychiatric coercion, is important. I think it's important you all think it's important.