corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11918

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Hansen B.
Sick children, or a sick society?
Amazon 2007 Nov 1
http://www.amazon.com/review/R27D5QGFK4O8W4/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm/


Notes:

A review of:
Olfman, Sharna (Ed). Bipolar Children: Cutting-Edge Controversy, Insights, and Research (Childhood in America) 2007 Praeger Publishers, Westport CT


Full text:

The number of U.S. children diagnosed with bipolar disorder rose an astounding 4,000% in the past ten years. This startling fact drives home the urgency of this important new book edited by Sharna Olfman and bringing together some of the world’s most distinguished experts in the field.

Each of the book’s nine contributors offers a unique perspective on the issue, providing readers with a comprehensive view of a controversial and disturbing subject.

Among the most passionate voices are those of Dr. David Healy and Dr.
Joanna Le Noury, who dissect the pharmaceutical industry’s unscrupulous strategies to expand the psychiatric drug market, resulting in the unprecedented “tidal wave” of child drugging currently sweeping our nation.

Award-winning journalist Robert Whitaker writes a carefully documented chapter citing solid scientific evidence showing that the widespread practice of medicating young children with stimulants like Ritalin or antidepressants like Prozac has fueled an explosion of drug side effects including psychosis, mania and suicidal impulses. These drug reactions are then misinterpreted as symptoms of severe mental illness, resulting in a mis-diagnosis of bipolar disorder which leads to treatment with “mood stabilizers” often combined in drug cocktails including major tranquilizers like Risperdal or Seroquel.

We may be witnessing a drug-induced epidemic of mental and physical disabilities directly caused by the irresponsible and misguided medical mis-treatment of our nation’s children. Psychology professor Daniel Burston looks at what is happening and calls it “the chemical colonization of childhood.”

Regardless of who or what we choose to blame for causing this catastrophe — Big Pharma, bad parenting, overcrowded schools, environmental toxins, television violence, etc. — one thing is
certain: nothing will change until DOCTORS stop making the diagnoses and DOCTORS stop writing the prescriptions. What will it take to bring about such a change?

Perhaps we should begin focusing less on the children who are diagnosed, and more on the doctors who do the diagnosing. Lawrence Diller writes, “Only economic factors, the threat of legal action, or very negative publicity (e.g., children’s deaths while taking
antidepressants) have widespread influence on doctors’ prescribing practices and treatment.”

In the book’s final chapter, epidemiologist Philip Landrigan sounds the alarm over the growing number of neurotoxic chemicals including mercury that are poisoning our environment. Landrigan writes, “It is striking that the mental health community has virtually ignored the health risks to children growing up in a world that is awash with thousands of synthetic chemicals, hundreds of which are already known to be poisonous to the brain.”

How ironic, then, if our society’s response to the harm caused by environmental toxins is to give our children drugs — chemical substances that are toxic to growing bodies and vulnerable brains!

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909