Does ADHD Even Exist?: The Ritalin Sham

By John Breeding
Issue 101, July-August 2000

Sidebar: Suffer the Children?
Sidebar: Ritalin Use - Simply Out Of Control
Sidebar: Here's a REAL Drug-free School

Alice, the mother of a seven-year-old son, Nathan, recently visited my office for a counseling session. Nathan had reportedly been different and difficult from the beginning: exhibiting early seizure-like activity, a most challenging temperament, great sensitivity to various types of stimulation, intense frustration, aggressive tantrums, and other apparent developmental difficulties. Alice had taken him to doctors from a young age, obtaining a variety of mostly nonspecific diagnoses of developmental problems.

Alice felt unappreciated as a parent, hurt and angry that the Montessori school her son had attended at ages four and five had ultimately rejected him. She felt judged by other parents, whom she felt blamed her for her son's challenging behavior. And she felt unsupported by both camps of opinion regarding "medication": the pro-Ritalin forces challenged her reluctance to use the drug for her son, and the antidrug group vehemently urged her to resist drug use.

Alice's personal stance on the Ritalin issue was clear. While she basically agreed that these "medications" are not good for children, she also felt that, in her family's case, it had been helpful.

Nathan had been diagnosed at age five with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and had taken Ritalin for a year. Alice thought the drug greatly helped her son, slowing him down enough so that he could listen and process information. She and her boyfriend both felt drugs made the boy much easier to be with; further, their own reduced stress eased them so much that they were now able to consider other alternatives for Nathan, such as nutritional supplementation.

Proponents of psychiatric drugs attest that they "work," meaning they alter mood, thought, and action. They also "work," of course, in that they assuage the medical community's expectation that drugs be used to "treat" these children. I believe that fully informed adults should have every right to voluntarily use any drugs they wish, as long as they don't endanger others in doing so. Children, however, are not able to give fully informed consent to drug use--especially those under six years of age, a group in whom we are witnessing a dramatic increase in psychiatric drug prescription.1 It is, therefore, our responsibility as adults to ensure every possible opportunity for optimal development for our children, to protect and defend our children from powerful toxic drugs, particularly those prescribed for psychiatric purposes.

Like Alice, a large percentage of adults who take psychiatric drugs or give them to their children would prefer to avoid them--and yet they capitulate and use them because the drugs provide relief: from tension, fear, and desperation, as well as from the external strains of judgment and coercion. Lawrence Diller, author of the best-selling book Running on Ritalin, argues that: "The 700 percent rise in Ritalin use is our canary in the mineshaft for the middle class, warning us that we aren't meeting the needs of all our children, not just those with ADD. It's time we rethought our priorities and expectations unless we want a nation of kids running on Ritalin."2 Dr. Diller decries the trend (as I do in my book The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses), contending that this increased reliance on drugs reflects a society in distress. Rather than try to force our children to shrink into situations that do not meet their needs, he states, we need to take responsibility for our society.

Diller himself is, however, torn by the same conflict many parents have concerning Ritalin. On the one hand, he says: "As a citizen I must speak out about the social conditions that create the living imbalance. Otherwise I am complicitous with forces and values that I believe are bad for children." On the other hand, though, he concludes: "As a physician, after assessing the child, his family and school situation, I keep prescribing Ritalin. My job is to ease suffering and Ritalin will help round- and octagonal-peg kids fit into rather rigid square educational holes." 3

This seemingly contradictory stance is the same one Alice and millions of other parents face. It's not as if all parents readily accept the prescription of Ritalin. Alice, in fact, incurred the wrath of her son's neurologist because she refused to give her son Adderall, a combination of three different amphetamine-like stimulants often used as an alternative to Ritalin. Increasingly over the past ten years or so, millions of parents are nagged by their children's physicians: "If your child had diabetes," the doctors taunt, for example, "you'd give him insulin wouldn't you?"

"What could I say to that?" Alice asked me. Her question was not so much a call for information as it was a need to express her hopelessness. It was encouraging to me that she was angry, for anger is a great antidote to hopelessness. She was mad about the treatment she had received from prior medical and mental health professionals, as well as the lack of support from two opposing drug camps.

Before I would hazard a possible response for that neurologist, Alice and I talked about the feelings of relief, guilt, and anger the Ritalin issue had caused for her family. Finally, I gave her what would have been my response: the diagnosis of ADHD is, itself, fraudulent.