Protesting the Drugging of Our Children
If there’s something that should have been abundantly clear by now, it’s the fact that I’m 100% opposed to the practice of labeling and subsequent psychotropic drugging of children. At its core, it is the world’s most-effective marketing sham, and too many parents fall for it.
The American Psychiatric Association held their annual marketing pitch to “doctors” in Philadelphia this year, and my family lent their voices to the many up there that came to demonstrate at the convention center and make it known how we feel about it.
Psychiatrists recently released their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual V – which literally is simply an eloquently-worded bunch of random observations about every facet of human behavior, compiled in such a way that psychiatrists can point at amazing-sounding illnesses like Nicotine Use Disorder for smokers, “Caffeine-Induced Sleep Disorder” or even “Complicated Grief Syndrome” for if you’re bereaving the loss of a loved one or pet dog. Any of these are simply then used as a ticket to push more drugs. Watch this video about it. It’ll open your eyes.
Because psychiatrists could never come up with a root cause for man’s ills – they’ve instead fallen back to just describing phenomena they see in people, and then prescribing drugs as “treatment” to mask one from that phenomena.
Unfortunately, this practice is not only a money-grabbing lie, it’s totally destructive. Psychiatric drugs are responsible for the real-life version of the Reavers from Joss Whedon’s Firefly / Serenity shows. They simply mask reality from a percentage of users, and for another percentage, they cause TERRIBLE side-effects, from physical disability & derangement to suicide, school shootings and soldiers going on insane killing sprees.
So, if it wasn’t clear before, let me make it clear now – if someone ever ever attempts to label the normal behavior of my children and push them onto mind-destroying drugs – Lord help them.
See this post for more photos of the May 2012 Philadelphia anti-psychiatry protest.
I can only hope that you will never have a family member that is bi-polar or schizophrenic. These are Real conditions that vitamins and suanas WILL NOT cure.
Saul – thanks for writing. Just so I’m 100% clear, I don’t doubt at all that people have mental health problems that need dealing with. Where someone is up one day and down the next, or where one has delusions or hallucinations – that definitely IS a problem. However with that, or with any problem an individual has – mental or physical – there is always a reason WHY.
The reason is NEVER that the person lacked sufficient medication in their bloodstream. Something brought on the onset of whatever undesirable phenomena they’re manifesting.
My issue is that the psycho-pharmacological racket is the ONLY profession I am aware of that gets away with simply being able to classify observable phenomena and then prescribe a “solution” which only involves nullifying one’s ability to produce or perceive the phenomena – in the place of finding a root cause.
I.e. if a person is massively depressed, I guarantee there is a reason for that. I think that anyone, no matter what their professional or philosophical background, would agree that it’d be best to actually get a root cause on such things, instead of giving up and just drugging them so that they don’t feel it anymore.
Tad recently posted…Protesting the Drugging of Our Children
It’s amazing to me that your organization is called “scientology”. Nothing about your beliefs on medications, mental illness, treatments, etc are based on science. Not one of them.
It’s astounding to see so many people who blindly follow these beliefs about not treating people with mental illness with medication. I guarantee that you have no background in mental health, yet feel as though you can make wild claims about “not drugging children”. Mental illness is a biologically-based (and influenced/ impacted by one’s environment) illness. That means that people who have Schizophrenia cannot be “cured” of it by taking vitamins and sitting in a sauna. It means that they require and DESERVE mental health treatment that is based on SCIENCE and RESEARCH. This may include medication, psychological treatment (psychotherapy, groups, social skills training) so that they can live their lives as independently as possible, but in the healthiest of ways.
The paradox in all of this– and in Scientology– is that the founder L. Rob Hubbard CLEARLY had Schizophrenia (Paranoid-type). How can you possibly read all of his “beliefs” and not consider the fact that he was mentally ill and not receiving psychiatric treatment. One of the hallmark symptoms that we see in people with severe mental illness is 1) not truly believing they have a mental illness and 2) not believing that they need treatment. That is a part of the illness, itself.
I would be interested in you could provide ONE piece of research the suggests that people with mental illness do not require medication (some may not need it, I agree with that)– but they deserve and require some type of treatment, whether that is medication and/ or psychotherapy. When I say one piece of research what I mean is to provide a study that is a randomized control trial that has been tested by non-Scientologists (meaning the data isn’t skewed based on their biases) and has been reviewed in a high impact journal (peer-reviewed journal).
I couldn’t fine one out of your organization– yet you continue to make these false, wildly incorrect gross accusations against medication, mental health treatment, and the field of psychiatry and psychology.
I would feel extremely sorry for you if you ever had a family member or friend who needed mental health treatment, as the vitamin/ sauna regimen is never going to make them better.
Tracy –
Wow. So many ways to reply to your comment. Where to start?
First, I can’t really tell if you’re a parent or not. If you are, hopefully we’re at least seeing eye-to-eye that in the end, we want what’s best for our kids, right? OK. That said:
Regarding Scientology & parenting: Please, first, do a little bit of perusing around this site for how Scientologists approach the topic of parenting. You cite “vitamin/sauna regimen” often as if that is what Scientology is. You refer to the Purification Rundown described here, a detoxification program which enables an individual to rid himself of the harmful effects of drugs, toxins and other chemicals that lodge in the body. It has NOTHING to do with parenting, and citing it is similar to if I railed against the ENTIRE MEDICAL FIELD and said that a triple-bypass heart surgery would never fix your broken leg. One doesn’t have to do with each other. So, check out my overall summary of how I approach parenting with respect to Scientology – that might help clear some things up.
What astounds me is the number of people who have bought the “chemical imbalance of the brain” marketing line. At least when folks hear a line like, “Chevy Trucks – Like a Rock” they don’t actually think they are made of rock. They know it’s a marketing line. But when you’ve got drug companies paying doctors to say “drug these kids” or paying doctors to ghost-write papers in their names saying how efficacious it is to drug away one’s problems, they don’t see through the fact that it’s just marketing. MARKETING. And unfortunately, Tracy, you’ve been marketed-to.
You are correct. I have no background as a psychiatrist, thank goodness. But I would say ANY parent who actually LOOKS AT and LISTENS TO their children is WAY MORE QUALIFIED to talk on the subject of the health and wellness of their children than the vast majority of psychiatrists who would talk at them for 5 minutes and then give them a pill.
Regarding the rest:
Finally, I’d have to say that I’m sorry that your only definition of “science” is when something has had a randomized control trial and then been published in a high-impact journal. I’m sure you are aware of how many of those studies are themselves funded by the drug companies that produce the drugs, and are then ghost-written by big pharma. Don’t take my word for it, or even anything remotely connected to my religion. Read up on folks like Joseph Biederman. It is for the reason of sick creeps like that, that I post articles like the above.
I’m not saying at ALL that irrational or destructive behaviour should not be addressed. I’m saying that one MUST MUST MUST find out WHY people are having problems, and handle THAT instead of drugging away their symptoms and then profiting from such.
I am a mother of two boys with neurological conditions, including one also with autism. I wholeheartedly agree with this article. But you fail to include the link to immune dysfunction, infections and illness and mental illness. Treating the immune system and finding and treating latent infections, such as Lyme disease, strep, mycoplasma, herpes viruses like Roseola, and other illnesses these children have, as well as testing for metabolic issues like adrenal gland problems and thyroid disease are a much better answer. Many have autoimmune diseases also. You can’t “cure” a child by shoving tons of vitamins down his throat, and though changing his diet can help a ton, it probably won’t cure him, unless the direct cause was due to food or preservative allergies. But give a child labeled bipolar who really has a thyroid problem the right thyroid medicine (like Armour thyroid), or give an autistic child like mine who has a latent strep infection and Epstein Barr virus antibiotics and an immune modulator to help his immune system function right, and you can fix our children, often without psychiatric drugs. Many of these kids also have immune deficiencies that can be addressed with things like IVIG.
My son has lost many of his autistic symptoms and no longer shows signs of Oppositional defiant disorder doctors once labeled him with now that we medically treat his PANDAS, an autoimmune brain disease.Yes, we did supplements and diet too, therapies as well. My son can be with typical children almost all the time, and we plan to one day phase him out of special education. He was once labeled moderately autistic.
Why are you not educating your members (especially parents) on these things? You are doing a huge disservice to them, especially if they have autistic children. Mental illness is treatable and it is very often linked to the immune system!
RM – thank you VERY much for this. I completely agree with where you’re at on the subject. If you could, please include some resources to draw from so that I can share what you’ve noted above. My only point in writing the original post was that the root cause of the trouble needs to be located – whether it’s a medical issue that one is dealing with or a simple parenting issue.
So, any links you have on what’s worked with your children, and things other parents should know about, would be greatly appreciated.
I can only comment from my own experience of extreme manic depression. I’m now 16 and have been cared for by a mental health team (CAMHS) since I was 12. My dad and other members of his side of the family have all experienced the ‘normal’ behaviour of believing others are plotting against tgem, this then leading to depressive symptoms. As soon as we’d been put onto fluoxetine our lives inproved. All the problems we’ve ever had can be explained by a simple chemical imbalance 🙂