56 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Let psychiatry rebut this point for point, March 3, 2004
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.
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44 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read it first or last-but you must read this important book!, February 25, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Talking Back to Ritalin: What Doctors Aren't Telling You about Stimulants for Children (Hardcover)
Challenging children exist, yes, but we as parents, teachers and others that work with children must step up to the challenge to give them what they need and move away from labeling and drugging--it is not necessary or effective and is in fact extremely detrimental--as this book so convincingly shows. After reading the full gamut of books (20+) on ADD/ADHD including those with conventional and unconventional views and remedies for the associated behaviors, I had doubts about the validity of ADD/ADHD as a distinct disorder. Dr. Breggin's book validates my doubts with pages of scientific documentation and explains how virtually a whole nation--parents, doctors, mental health professionals and teachers--promote and believe in this concept. It's a must read for anyone involved in ADD/ADHD evaluations/treatments. The book focuses on four areas: the fallacy of ADD/ADHD-including the unscientific method of diagnosis and the misuse of studies used by the advocates of the "disorder"; the documented dangers of Ritalin-- what it does to the brain, why it does not help behavioral problems and the damage it can cause; the politics behind the ADHD/Ritalin lobby; and what parents can do to help their children without labels and drugs. This is such an important book. If you've read the others, you must read this!! Another good book is The Myth of the ADD Child by Thomas Armstrong PhD.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent! - Thorough and well reasoned argument, August 25, 2004
I think this book is one of the best researched in the alternative view about drugs. It gives well reasoned arguments that aught to give pause for the knee jerk phenemoma that is going on with Stimulant drugs and our youth.
Yes Dr. Breggin is thoroughly biased, but that is a given for all human beings. Being biased in itself is not a bad thing, because it often is simply the expression of passion and certainty. Bias is a problem when there are no clear arguments or good reason to support the bias. Dr. Breggin is always quite thorough in supporting his point of view.
To be fair, he gives almost no credibility to the opposite view. Since I happen to mostly share his bias, it is not something I have a problem with.
While it is apparent that for many children, stimulant medications have effects and do help, the question is really about the cost of that help for the long term. Should we be using these drugs as the first and often only solution? If we can help these kids without resorting to drugs, wouldn't that be best? Once that diagnosis is surrendered to along with a lifetime of stimulant medications, is that the best option? That is what Breggin is getting at here, are we really looking at this thoroughly or simply swallowing what we are told?
I'm biased against the drugs because I've been successfully treating adults and children with ADD, ADHD, OCD, etc with homeopathic medicine for several years now. Many of my collegues in homeoapthy report similar success.
There is a good book out called "Ritalin Free Kids" By the Ullman's that goes into some depth about homeopathy - one of the best solutions for ADD, ADHD, etc. The book, "Impossible Cure" (Amy Lansky), is also a wonderful primer for those interested in researching homeopathy.
The only dissappointment I have for Breggins' books in general, is he is simply not thorough enough for my tastes in talking about solutions. There are many kids who have VERY disturbing problems in this spectrum, and some of his solutions are too simplistic and not realistic. It is with some of these extreme cases that we see homeopathy really shine, in a way that drugs can't match. There must be other alternative methods as well that really work. So that is my only concern with this book, lack of research into alternative solutions.
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