I am a licensed clinical social worker with seven years' experience working with troubled children, and am now director of a large therapeutic foster care program. From my practical experience, and from my reading, the negative reviews of this book, calling Breggin unscientific, ranting, etc. have got it exactly wrong. The "literature" supporting Ritalin and other stimulants is biased and only intermittently scientific - more like ad copy than fact. It is easy to see why stimulants dominate the treatment of ADHD. Drug companies spend over $20 billion a year on promotion - more than they spend on research.What does this money buy them? David Healy, internationally known psychiatric researcher and writer, claims about 50 percent of all psychiatric journal articles are ghost written by employees of drug companies, and that 30% of The American Psychiatric Association's income comes from drug company subsidies, grants and advertising. Around 70 percent of all drug research is funded by the drug companies themselves, and most of the rest, funded by the government, is heavily influenced by drug companies' extensive lobbying machinery.
Major journals (including The New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet) have lamented the control of research and publishing by drug company money: The New England Journal of Medicine editorialized, stating they could hardly find reviewers for their psychiatric drug articles who did not have conflicts of interest due to financial ties with drug companies. Studies funded by drug companies, that don't support the companies' drugs, are rarely published.
The bottom line: professionals and the public are bombarded with a stream of "research" and "information" financed and spun by the people who make and sell these drugs. The conflict of interest is palpable.
Many people lack access to effective non-drug ways to deal with "ADHD." But this is no proof that the drugs are especially effective and safe - it just shows the advantage of having billions of dollars to finance and promote the drugs.
I have a challenge for readers who dismiss Breggin's book: Read half a dozen responsible critiques of biopsychiatry and psychiatric drugs. Try David Healy's The Creation of Psychopharmacology, also Healy's Let Them Eat Prozac (soon to come out in the U.S.), Robert Whitaker's Mad in America, Glenmullen's Prozac Backlash, Fisher and Greenberg's From Placebo to Panacea - Putting Psychiatric Drugs to the Test, and Elliott Valenstein's Blaming the Brain - The Truth About Drugs and Mental Health.
These are not works by new agers who think crystals heal schizophrenia. They are by respected academics, researchers and clinicians (and not all of them, especially Healy and Glenmullen, are against psychiatric drugs).
But read these books, and note the claims and evidence they cite about the drugs. Now, here's the challenge: look in mainstream psychiatric literature for any serious attempt to address these claims. I've read over forty books, pro and con, on psychiatric drugs - and I've yet to find pro-drug literature that addresses 98% of these arguments, not in general, and not point by point.
This is a matter of informed consent. See if Peter Breggin's words in Toxic Psychiatry are not at least very plausible: "In the world of modern psychiatry claims can become truth, hopes can become achievements and propaganda is taken as science".
Yes, Breggin is angry. He pulls no punches and gives no quarter. But he deserves serious consideration - he has been qualified as an expert witness in numerous product liability cases against drug companies around the country. Try to find, anywhere, point by point refutations of the specific claims he makes in this book. Except for a few points, biopsychiatry's silence on Breggin's claims is deafening. Ask an "authority" on ADHD whether, as Breggin claims, the pannel of experts at the NIH Consensus Conference on ADHD DID or DID NOT conclude in their final report, "..there are no data to indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction," and ask the "authority" who it was that later took it upon himself to edit that statement to muddle the wording, but without changing its bottom line. And ask if it is true that the conference organizer, Peter Jensen, later admitted in a 2000 article that the experts at this conference found NO proof that "ADHD reflects a disordered state."(See Breggin, page 16).
If, after looking into the issue, you decide to give your child Ritalin, so be it. But each parent, child and professional deserves to know the whole story - something you will not get reading standard psychiatric literature.
