The review about this product
If you are a parent with a "difficult" child, chances are you have seen pamphlets in your doctor's office on ADHD. These reassuring documents tell you that the drugs will transform your child, and assure you that they are safe and effective. Turn the pamphlets over, however, and you'll see that they are printed by the drug companies. Visit the CHADD (the big ADHD support group)web site and you'll see the same info. Don't worry, they tell you -- your child has a "neurobiological disorder" and none of it is your fault or the child's fault. Dig around in their site and you might notice a mention at the bottom of their annual report page that they receive funding from the drug companies. Oh...I'd like to believe this happy information. But these mainstream sources never seem to address in any depth at all the questions that naturally arise: what is the long term effect of keeping your child on the equivalent of speed for several years? How do children feel about being labeled disordered, and about solving their problems with pills? Doesn't that cause damage in itself? What studies have been done to see if kids on these drugs are more likely to become addicted to drugs later in life? How much testing has been done on young children? What is the plan for getting a child off the drugs and teaching them to cope with their "disorder"? Or can they expect to spend all their lives on stimulants? All of these are answered -- if they are addressed at all -- with brief reassurances that there is no need to worry. These are powerful drugs that are restricted and monitored by the government. I need more than glib reassurances before I will put my child on them.This book looks at all the unattractive aspects of these drugs that CHADD and the "experts" brush off so lightly. Anyone can manipulate data, but Breggin quotes time and again from the pro-drug scientists' own studies to show the lack of hard evidence that the drugs work over time, that they are safe, and even that ADHD exists as a disease. He uses their own words to make his point. As a reasonably intelligent reader, I know Breggin is making an argument for his own point of view, and thus has a bias. But I am more likely to trust the document that tackles the tough questions than the ones that pretend they don't even exist.
This book certainly does not have all the answers. It does not offer a real way to handle these kids, (beyond "fix the schools, and give them love and attention"). But it takes a well-documented and convincing look at the frighteningly flimsy basis for the mass drugging of children.
