Because of my interest in helping kids with behaviorial and developmental disorders, I was asked by the Oregon Chapter of the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) to make some introductory comments yesterday evening to help kick off Parent's Night at a CCHR exhibit called "Psychiatry: An Industry of Death." This exhibit is a traveling version of a permanent installation established in 2005 at CCHR International’s headquarters in Los Angeles. The Museum and the Touring Exhibit comprise 14 documentaries, based on interviews with more than 160 experts in the fields of medicine, psychiatry, psychology, law, justice, history, science, education and more. The exhibit's primary concern is the high death rate and abuse in the mental health field.
I was introduced to CCHR about three years ago by friends in Southern, California. I watched a video documentary that had the same title as the exhibit. To put it as politely as possible, the documentary painted an extremely vivid picture of the inglorious history of the psychiatric profession and the shortcomings of its methods of diagnosis and treatment. On the whole, it can leave you with the impression that psychiatrists are, well...evil. The video was hard for me to confront, actually. It messed with my world view. After all, my brother-in-law is a psychiatrist by training; and not only is he not evil, but he's decent and kind and ethical. And I've met other people in the profession who I have also thought to be very decent, well intentioned people.
However, the fact that there are some very decent people out there who happen to be psychiatrists doesn't mean that there aren't flaws in the way that psychiatrists go about diagnosing and treating problems--especially children's problems.
As I mentioned in my last blog entry, I have spent the last 17 months studying principles of functional neurology. This discipline makes it possible not only to diagnose problems related to central nervous system dysfunction, but also to devise treatment strategies for their handling without the use of drugs. One of the most promising applications of functional neurology is in the treatment of children diagnosed with what neural scientists refer to as functional disconnection syndromes such as:
- Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
- Autism spectrum disorders
- Asperger's syndrome
- Childhood disintegrative disorder (CDD)
- Dyslexia and processing disorders
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
- Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD)
- Tourette syndrome
- Nonverbal learning disability
What all these childhood behavioral and developmental disorders have in common is an imbalance of electrical activity in the brain, especially between the right and left hemispheres. Because neurons are plastic--or capable of altering their connections based on changes in stimuli received--it is possible to design therapies that rebuild functionally deficient areas of the brain and the neurological pathways that connect them. That, in a nutshell, is the functional neurological approach to treating functional disconnection syndromes.
By contrast, I want to review how I believe these conditions typically get handled. It often starts with a teacher or a school administrator encouraging you to have your child evaluated by a specialist. The specialist is usually a psychologist or a psychiatrist who administers some kind of symptom survey based on diagnostic criteria listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Based on subjective interpretation of the survey results, a course of treatment is recommended. In the great majority of cases, the treatment includes psychiatric drugs.
I came across a great passage in the first chapter of Robert Melillo's book, Disconnected Kids, that I want to share with you:
Last year, doctors in the United States wrote an estimated 20 million prescriptions for Ritalin. And this estimate is considered conservative. ADHD is the leading childhood disorder in the world, and Ritalin is the most widely prescribed medication for children. The use of Ritalin increased a staggering 800 percent between 1990 and 1998, even though it has severe side effects and its long-term consequences on the developing mind are still unknown. It is effective in less than 70 percent of cases. The drug is becoming so commonplace it is even being prescribed for children as young as age four.Melillo's book was published in 2009, so the numbers may actually be higher now. In any case, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not a fanatical anti-drug crusader. There’s an appropriate time for using drugs therapeutically. It’s just that there’s a toxic burden associated with taking any drug. This is not an opinion, it's a fact; any medical doctor or pharmacist will confirm it. And any responsible medical physician knows that when you prescribe a drug, you have to weigh its clinical efficacy against its potentially harmful side effects. In my opinion, the clinical efficacy of psychiatric drugs is spotty, the severe side effects are very well documented, and the long-term effects on developing young minds are simply not at all well understood.
I have an acquaintance whose child was eventually diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder about five years. Thankfully, he's doing quite well now, but only after being taken off drugs, which transformed him in ways that his mother told me were quite disturbing. I'm hoping that his mom will either make a comment after reading this blog entry or allow me to interview her for a future story.
Drug treatment is so widespread in treating childhood developmental and behavioral disorders due to the widely held but erroneous belief that no cure is possible for these problems. But the problems are, in fact correctable.
They’re correctable, because, as I mentioned earlier, brain cells are plastic--or in other words, capable of altering their connections based on changes in stimuli they receive from the environment. What this means is that if you can safely and objectively evaluate which parts of the brain are functionally deficient--and I know firsthand that it’s possible to do this--then you can design treatment therapies that rebuild the functionally deficient areas and the neurological pathways that connect them, re-balance the brain, and correct the problem.
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