http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/medicating/interviews/baughman.html You take the position that ADHD and many of these other psychiatric diagnoses are fraudulent. Why? The American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual, the DSM, lists 18 behaviors, from which a teacher can check off behaviors she observes in the potential patient or student. Likewise, the parent or caregiver does the same thing. In the current DSM, if one checks six or more of the nine, the individual is deemed to have ADHD. Let there be no mistake about it. Present-day psychiatry, led by the National Institute of Mental Health in league with the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry, represents ADHD ... to be a biologic abnormality of the brain, a so-called neurobiologic disorder. Their representation to the entire public and to all the teachers and all mental health professionals is that, having ticked off six or more of these nine behaviors, one has diagnosed an organic or a physical abnormality of the brain. Their neurobiologic propaganda has been so intense for so many years, that the country believes in this. This is the characterization of ADHD that virtually all physicians give to potential patients or parents of patients. This is the characterization that educators give to parents of students in schools. ... If psychiatry and the NIMH were saying, "We're only diagnosing troublesome behaviors in a normal individual. And we are going to remedy these with behavior modification or with talk therapy or with family therapy or with educational techniques," that would be entirely true from a scientific point of view, and entirely valid. But as Dr. William Cary said at the NIH consensus conference, "You've got five out of nine, and you're quite all right. You get six out of nine, and suddenly your brain turns to mush; it turns abnormal. I've got a lot of trouble with that." Why can't we just call them normal? We've got probably, conservatively ... 6 million children in the United States on medications for ADHD and a total of 9 million with neurobiologic psychiatric diagnoses of one sort or another, on one or more psychotropic drugs. Here we're talking about as many kids as you've got people in New York City, and to me, this is a catastrophe. These are all normal children. Psychiatry has never validated ADHD as a biologic entity, so their fraud and their misrepresentation is in saying to the parents of the patients in the office, saying to the public of the United States, that this and every other psychiatric diagnosis is, in fact, a brain disease.
Establishing whether it's actually a biological brain disease seems to be a less important issue. The question is whether there aren't certain conditions with symptoms that can't be aided and addressed with psychotropic medications. What's wrong with that? Well, what they've done essentially is to propose that there are children who, up to the time they walk down the schoolhouse path, seem to everyone to be entirely normal. But what they have proposed is that there are children who are misbehaving at school and at home who are inherently unable to achieve self-control because they've got something wrong in their brain. This ignores whether or not their parenting is optimal, and whether or not their de facto parenting in school or disciplining at school in the hands of a teacher is optimal or not. There aren't many