DON’T LET YOUR CHILD SEE A PSYCHIATRIST. EVER.

By Jon Rappoport

December 13, 2012

If you have a child, don’t let him/her see a psychiatrist. Ever.

Read Mike Adams’ new article about psychiatry. It’s one of the best I’ve ever read, and I’ve been researching this pseudoscience for 20 years.

http://www.naturalnews.com/038322_DSM-5_psychiatry_false_diagnosis.html

Then read this one, too. It’s also excellent. I wrote it.

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2012/02/27/the-liars-liar/

Yes, I know, I’m bragging, which is a sign of a mental disorder: Self-Inflation at the Expense of Sacred Psychiatry Disorder. The preferred treatment is electroshock therapy and MKULTRA re-programming. I’m opting for a walk in the park coupled with two doses of outrage at these fake doctors who poison brains and believe they’re healers.

Here is a clue. The government gives psychiatry its fake legitimacy. That’s how the game works. The government blesses the medical licensing boards that award psychiatrists permission to drug your children, alter their brains, poison them, and of course make all the fake diagnoses in the first place.

Without the government, these fakes would sink into the waves and be gone forever. Nobody in his right mind or wrong mind would ever step into a psychiatrist’s office. It would be like volunteering to stumble out on to a mine field seeded with explosives.

Media, naturally, go along with the psychiatric hoax. Thousands of articles keep coming out of the hopper to support the authoritative pronouncements of these deranged monsters with medical degrees and “training” in diagnosing mental illnesses.

There are no mental illnesses or disorders. There never have been.

There are people with problems, there are people who suffer, there are people who are in desperate circumstances, there are people who have severe nutritional deficiencies, there are people who have been poisoned by various chemicals, there are people who have been abused and ignored, there are people who have been told there is something wrong with them, there are people who are different and can’t deal with the conforming androids in their midst, but there are no mental disorders.

None.

It’s fiction. It’s a billion-dollar fiction. It’s a gigantic steaming pile of bullshit. Always has been.

There is not a single diagnostic test for any so-called mental disorder. Never has been. No blood test, no urine test, no saliva test, no brain scan, no genetic test. No science.

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2012/09/05/more-evidence-psychiatry-is-a-fake-science/

So why hasn’t psychiatry been destroyed and outlawed? Because there is money in it. Big money. Pharmaceutical money. And because the public is in a trance. Mothers and fathers are quite willing to take their children to these brain poisoners…lambs to the slaughter.

The silence of the lambs.

People are entranced by so-called professionals with fancy degrees who speak technical babble. It all seems real. Because if it weren’t real, then…what? People would be forced to admit they are living in a fantasy. And people don’t want to admit that. They would rather die than admit that.

But that’s what psychiatry is. An elaborate fantasy. If every psychiatrist in the world vanished tomorrow, the world would immediately become a far healthier place.

If every celebrity who outrageously whores for psychiatry would stop on a dime, the world would be a far healthier place right away.

You think Dr. Phil is a fake? He’s nothing compared to psychiatrists with their prescription pads. He’s a saint by comparison. The drugs are brain poisons. If you really want to know the truth about the drugs, go to breggin.com and read everything Dr. Peter Breggin has ever written about the drugs. He covers the whole slimy waterfront.

There is some horrendous handwriting on wall. Believe me. You can see it all around you if you look. The shrinks are treating younger and younger children with the brain poisons, every day. They’re diagnosing children who are practically toddlers and they’re drugging them. They’re ripping their brains. It’s happening. You may not want to know about it, but it’s there. It’s a crime on the order of murder.

And the bastards at the FDA and the bastards who train doctors in medical schools are going along with it. They’re accomplices to the ongoing crime. They have blood on their hands.

Here is a story Dr. Breggin told in his classic book, Toxic Psychiatry. It says it all:

“Roberta was a college student, getting good grades, mostly A’s, when she first became depressed and sought psychiatric help at the recommendation of her university health service. She was eighteen at the time, bright and well motivated, and a very good candidate for psychotherapy. She was going through a sophomore-year identity crisis about dating men, succeeding in school, and planning a future. She could have thrived with a sensitive therapist who had an awareness of women’s issues.

“Instead of moral support and insight, her doctor gave her Haldol. Over the next four years, six different physicians watched her deteriorate neurologically without warning her or her family about tardive dyskinesia [motor brain damage] and without making the [tardive dyskinesia] diagnosis, even when she was overtly twitching in her arms and legs. Instead they switched her from one neuroleptic to another, including Navane, Stelazine, and Thorazine. Eventually a rehabilitation therapist became concerned enough to send her to a general physician, who made the diagnosis [of medical drug damage]. By then she was permanently physically disabled, with a loss of 30 percent of her IQ.

“…my medical evaluation described her condition: Roberta is a grossly disfigured and severely disabled human being who can no longer control her body. She suffers from extreme writhing movements and spasms involving the face, head, neck, shoulders, limbs, extremities, torso, and back-nearly the entire body. She had difficulty standing, sitting, or lying down, and the difficulties worsen as she attempts to carry out voluntary actions. At one point she could not prevent her head from banging against nearby furniture. She could hold a cup to her lip only with great difficulty. Even her respiratory movements are seriously afflicted so that her speech comes out in grunts and gasps amid spasms of her respiratory muscles…Roberta may improve somewhat after several months off the neuroleptic drugs, but she will never again have anything remotely resembling a normal life.”

If the smug scum who run the NY Times put THAT story on the front page right under a huge headline, we might see something good happen in this country.

Chronic whiners want to claim the government has to protect everybody all the time, as if that were possible, as if that were really the government’s aim. These whiners are busy-bodies, meddlers, and self-made victims. They sometimes pose as scientists. They love psychiatry. They equate psychiatry with government. You know, “share and care.”

They assert that government knows best. At bottom, they’re vicious little idiots.

But they’re very useful idiots, because the government welcomes their help in keeping the populace in line.

And psychiatry is a cardinal strategy in that regard.

Chemical straitjackets for the lambs.

The silence of the lambs.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

More evidence psychiatry is a fake science

by Jon Rappoport

September 4, 2012

www.nomorefakenews.com

Evidence isn’t something you make up out of thin air. You dig it up. If you’re fortunate, you find crucial evidence in statements of the very people who are pretending to tell the truth. That’s the jackpot.

I’ve written several articles debunking the “science” behind psychiatry. As you might guess, this is not a popular approach with the gatekeepers of our culture.

The gatekeepers want psychiatry to be thought of as a science, and since it isn’t, they exercise their only option: they lie. And then they lie again. It’s the time-honored strategy of all propaganda. Keep repeating the falsehood until people believe it and accept it.

Evidence doesn’t work that way. You don’t need to keep repeating it in order to make it real. If you’re digging in the sand to uncover clues to a lost city, you don’t need to re-dig that area of sand hiding the temple and the road and the statues. You do it once and that’s enough. You say, “See? Here’s the city.”

But culturally speaking, you do need to keep flashing photos of the lost city, because people have been trained to think there was no civilization way back when. You have to separate people from the false thinking and indoctrination.

So now I’m flashing evidence I’ve uncovered before. It’s a statement made by a prominent psychiatrist on an episode of PBS’ Frontline series. The episode was: “Does ADHD Exist?”

Here it is.

PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there’s no biological marker—that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.

BARKLEY (Dr. Russell Barkley, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center): That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid…There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid. [Emphasis added]

Dr. Barkley blows the whistle on his own profession, and then he turns around and makes it even better by claiming the incontrovertible evidence isn’t evidence at all. He claims we’re all illiterate when it comes to fathoming what science is all about.

So let’s take Dr. Barkley to school. Medical science, and disease-research in particular, rests on the notion that you can make a diagnosis backed up by lab tests. If you can’t produce lab tests, you’re spinning fantasies.

These fantasies might be hopeful, they might be “educated guesses,” they might be launched from traditional centers of learning, they might be backed up by billions of dollars of grant money…but they’re still fantasies.

If I said the moon was made of green cheese, even if I were a Harvard professor, sooner or later someone would ask me to produce a sample of moon rock that was tested for “cheese qualities.” I might begin to feel nervous, I might want to tap dance around the issue, but I would have to submit the rock to a lab.

In the case of psychiatry, the DSM, which is the bible of the American Psychiatric Association, currently lists 297 official mental disorders. They are named, labeled, and described. Dr. Barkley admits there is no lab test for any of those 297 disorders.

Yes, there is a lot of chatter about “chemical imbalances in the brain,” but there is no test.

Dr. Barkley employs a version of logical analysis in his statement to the PBS Frontline interviewer. Barkley is essentially saying, “There is no lab test for any mental disorder. But if a test were the standard of proof, we wouldn’t have science at all, and that would mean our whole profession rests on nothing—and that is absurd, so therefore a test doesn’t matter.”

That logic is no logic at all. Barkley is proving the case against himself. He just doesn’t want to admit it.

If psychiatry were nothing more than an intellectual game in a vacuum, it wouldn’t matter. But each diagnosis is followed by powerful and dangerous drugs, and people take those drugs.

In a business sense (and psychiatry is a business), the DSM is really a book that tells psychiatrists what they can bill insurance companies for. That’s the essence of the book. There are 297 ways a psychiatrist can get paid. No insurance company is going to step up to the plate and declare psychiatry a rank fraud. Insurance companies don’t operate that way. They are in partnership with psychiatry. Insurance companies employ actuaries to figure out how claims can be paid and still leave nice profit margins. That’s the game.

Think of all the studies that have been done to show that street drugs harm people. Has that stopped traffickers from selling heroin and cocaine? Well, the analogy has merit. Do you expect psychiatrists and insurance companies to hold a press conference and admit their whole operation is a top-to-bottom fraud with devastating health consequences?

At the root of this ongoing RICO crime is the issue of personal freedom. Do people have the absolute right to refuse psychiatric medication? If, for example, in the United States, Obamacare is not repealed, there are going to be many, many more diagnoses of mental disorders. Eventually, accepting these diagnoses, and the drug prescriptions that follow, is going to be made a condition of membership in the national insurance plan. That’s why drug companies and insurance companies are on board. They are looking forward to more business.

I have made this offer before, and I’m making it again. Let’s have an extensive web debate about the science of psychiatry. Let’s air the whole thing out, with people from both sides at the podium. I’m not talking about sound bites. I want a thorough exposition. Let’s see who makes more sense.

Here is what I believe would be exposed. People would finally understand that committees of psychiatrists, in their deliberations, take menus of human behavior, and then they group behaviors into clusters. For each cluster, they determine there is a disorder. They sit in a room and argue all this out, and come up with labels and symptoms—and in this thoroughly unscientific fashion, they recycle human suffering and emotional pain and confusion and problems into neat categories. They provide no tests. They simply make the rules, and they expect obedience, because they are the self-appointed authorities.

This is a staggering fact. It may be hard to acknowledge the depth and breadth of the fraud, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fraud. It only means people have been indoctrinated to salute “the experts.”

It also means other explanations are going to be needed for what we say are “crazy behaviors.” But that need doesn’t imply that the experts are right. It simply indicates we have been following an unproven path and we need to shift gears.

It’s always easier to give in to the experts. But Easier is not a scientific standard that should win our approval. Easier is what we opt for when we prefer a manufactured rigged consensus.

Independent thinking is a whole different animal. It applies and it challenges us across the board of our entire civilization. Should we believe what we are told without reflection? Should we buy the most popular items for sale? Or should we explore what lies beyond the comfort zone?

Close to 50 years ago, psychiatry was dying out as a profession. Fewer and fewer people wanted to see a psychiatrist for help, for talk therapy. All sorts of new therapies were popping up. The competition was leaving medical psychiatry in the dust.

As Dr. Peter Breggin describes it in his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, a deal was struck. Drug companies would bankroll psychiatry and rescue it. These companies would pour money into professional conferences, journals, research. In return, they wanted “science” that would promote mental disease as a biological fact, a gateway into the drugs. Everyone would win—except the patient.

So the studies were rolled out, and the list of mental disorders expanded. The FDA was in on the deal as well, as evidenced by their drug approvals, in the face of the obvious damage these drugs were doing.

So this is how we arrived at where we are. This was the plan, and it worked.

Under the cover story, it was all fraud all the time. Without much of a stretch, you could say psychiatry has been the most inept and widespread profiling operation in the history of the human race. Its goal has been to bring humans everywhere into its system. It hardly matters which label a person is painted with, as long as it adds up to a diagnosis and a prescription of drugs.

Fake science comes in many forms. Psychiatry is one of the most egregious forms ever invented.

Jon Rappoport

The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world.

www.nomorefakenews.com

Selling the psychiatric paradigm

by Jon Rappoport

August 4, 2012

www.nomorefakenews.com

The culture of psychiatry goes beyond the brain-scrambling effects of the drugs.

It begins with the idea that there are distinct and definable mental disorders shared by many people. This is a false premise the most hinky grifter and con man would never dare to peddle.

It’s technical voodoo made to appear like science: the science of The Mental Disorder.

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2011/06/30/biggest-bullshitter-in-america/

For every disorder, a drug. For every diagnosis, a prescription. For every false claim to scientific legitimacy, a denial of the uniqueness of the patient.

Psychiatry is covert collectivism: “we all have mental disorders of one kind or another and we need to acknowledge that and help each other limp down the road of life.”

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2012/08/02/the-batman-op-expands-you-shot-those-people/

The notion that you can “cure a mental condition” and thereby set a person free is an illusion. There are no mental conditions. The 297 disorders listed in the current bible of the psychiatric profession are merely pharmaceutical marketing ploys and guidelines for insurance billing.

As I stated in a recent article, the history of the human race is the record of the struggle to bring, from WE, the idea of I, the individual. From many cultures based on the collective WE, a tremendous revolution overthrew the manufactured consensus, and the singular I emerged out of the swamp. Now we are witnessing a reversal, a falling back into the primitive WE, and this absurd journey is festooned with slogans and assurances that some sort of paradise awaits us if we will only give in and melt down.

The goo is All!

That is the true underlying slogan, and it should be engraved across the front facade of the White House and the headquarters of the American Psychiatric Association.

The psychiatric adhesive that promotes collectivism is “mental disorders that are shared by millions of people.”

But who owns your mind? Who is the expert? Who is the court of last resort? Who ultimately can take those energies and direct them toward the discovery and fulfillment of a vision? Who decides what the vision is? Who has that freedom and that choice?

A group? A collective? A professional who makes diagnoses and dispenses drugs?

Who finally makes meaning out of your existence and charts a course?

Are you prepared to give that away?

Read the words of a man who was once the most widely praised psychiatrist in the world, the president of Canadian Psychiatric Association, the president of the American Psychiatric Association, the president of the World Psychiatric Association, the president of the American Psychopathological Association, the president of the Society of Biological Psychiatry:

“In the electro-shock procedure, we have means of producing graduated amnesia, and it is of interest to note that there is a proportional relationship between the number of electroshocks given within a period of time and the extent of the amnesias. It is quite possible, for instance, to produce a long-lasting, probably permanent, amnesia by setting the number of electroshock treatments to be given within a predetermined period.”

(1963, “The Processes of Remembering,” British Journal of Psychology, 109: 325-340)

Donald Ewen Cameron, once the king of psychiatry, wrote those words and administered many, many high-intensity shock treatments to patients, with the goal of erasing their memories and installing, in the second phase of his monstrous treatment-torture, entirely new personalities of his own choosing.

That was his view of the inviolable nature of the Individual.

If you think electroshock is the only psychiatric treatment capable of rendering such great harm, read Dr. Peter Breggin’s landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry. For example, how does, at minimum, 400,000 cases of motor brain damage from just one class of psychiatric drug strike you?

And read Dr. Gary Kohls’ excellent article on the role of psychiatric drugs in homicides:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32135

Jon Rappoport

The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Ritalin is not a soft psychiatric drug

by Jon Rappoport

July 31, 2012

NoMoreFakeNews.com

In the wake of the Aurora shootings, we are seeing another round of questions about the psychiatric drugs that can cause harm and impel violence.

Here is an excerpt from my 1999 white paper, WHY DID THEY DO IT? AN INQUIRY INTO THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS IN AMERICA. All the data in it are from that time period. Since then, several million more children have been put on Ritalin in the US.

Ritalin, manufactured by Novartis, is the close cousin to speed which is given to perhaps two million American schoolchildren for a condition called Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), or ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

ADD and ADHD, for which no organic causes have ever been found, are touted as disease-conditions that afflict the young, causing hyperactivity, unmanageability, and learning problems. Of course, when you name a disorder or a syndrome and yet can find no single provable organic cause for it, you have nothing more than a loose collection of behaviors with an arbitrary title.

Correction: you also have a pharmaceutical bonanza.

Dr. Peter Breggin, referring to an official directory of psychiatric disorders, the DSM-III-R, writes that withdrawal from amphetamine-type drugs, including Ritalin, can cause “depression, anxiety, and irritability as well as sleep problems, fatigue, and agitation.” Breggin then remarks, “The individual may become suicidal in response to the depression.”

The well-known Goodman and Gilman’s The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics reveals a strange fact. It states that Ritalin is “structurally related to amphetamines… Its pharmacological properties are essentially the same as those of the amphetamines.” In other words, the only clear difference is legality. And the effects, in layman’s terms, are obvious. You take speed and after awhile, sooner or later, you start crashing. You become agitated, irritable, paranoid, delusional, aggressive.

A firm and objective medical review needs to be done in all of the school shootings, to determine how many of the shooters were on, or had at one time been on, Ritalin.

In his landmark classic, Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the ‘New Psychiatry’ (St. Martin’s Press, 1991), Dr. Breggin discusses the subject of drug combinations: “Combining antidepressants [e.g., Prozac, Luvox] and psychostimulants [e.g., Ritalin] increases the risk of cardiovascular catastrophe, seizures, sedation, euphoria, and psychosis. Withdrawal from the combination can cause a severe reaction that includes confusion, emotional instability, agitation, and aggression.”

Children are frequently medicated with this combination, and when we highlight such effects as aggression, psychosis, and emotional instability, it is obvious that the result is pointing toward the very real possibility of violence.

In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].

Scarnati listed over a hundred adverse affects of Ritalin and indexed published journal articles for each of these symptoms.

For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects then, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:

• Paranoid delusions
• Paranoid psychosis
• Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
• Activation of psychotic symptoms
• Toxic psychosis
• Visual hallucinations
• Auditory hallucinations
• Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
• Effects pathological thought processes
• Extreme withdrawal
• Terrified affect
• Started screaming
• Aggressiveness
• Insomnia
• Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphatamine-like effects
• psychic dependence
• High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
• Decreased REM sleep
• When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
• Convulsions
• Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.

Many parents around the country have discovered that Ritalin has become a condition for their children continuing in school. There are even reports, by parents, of threats from social agencies: “If you don’t allow us to prescribe Ritalin for your ADD child, we may decide that you are an unfit parent. We may decide to take your child away.”

This mind-boggling state of affairs is fueled by teachers, principals, and school counselors, none of whom have medical training.

Yet the very definition of the “illness” for which Ritalin would be prescribed is in doubt, especially at the highest levels of the medical profession. This doubt, however, has not filtered down to most public schools.

In commenting on Dr. Lawrence Diller’s book, Running on Ritalin, Dr. William Carey, Director of Behavioral Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has written, “Dr. Diller has correctly described… the disturbing trend of blaming children’s social, behavioral, and academic performance problems entirely on an unproven brain deficit…”

On November 16-18, 1998, the National Institute of Mental Health held the prestigious “NIH Consensus Development Conference on Diagnosis and Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder [ADHD].” The conference was explicitly aimed at ending all debate about the diagnoses of ADD, ADHD, and about the prescription of Ritalin. It was hoped that at the highest levels of medical research and bureaucracy, a clear position would be taken: this is what ADHD is, this is where it comes from, and these are the drugs it should be treated with.

That didn’t happen, amazingly. Instead, the official panel responsible for drawing conclusions from the conference threw cold water on the whole attempt to reach a comfortable consensus.

Panel member Mark Vonnegut, a Massachusetts pediatrician, said, “The diagnosis [of ADHD] is a mess.”

The panel essentially said it was not sure ADHD was even a “valid” diagnosis. In other words, ADD and ADHD might be nothing more than attempts to categorize certain children’s behaviors-with no organic cause, no clear-cut biological basis, no provable reason for even using the ADD or ADHD labels.

The panel found “no data to indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction [which malfunction had been the whole psychiatric assumption].”

The panel found that Ritalin has not been shown to have long-term benefits. In fact, the panel stated that Ritalin has resulted in “little improvement on academic achievement or social skills.”

Panel chairman, David Kupfer, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, said, “There is no current validated diagnostic test [for ADHD].”

Yet at every level of public education in America, there remains what can only be called a voracious desire to give children Ritalin (or other similar drugs) for ADD or ADHD.

Nullifying the assurances and prescriptions doctors routinely give to parents of children who have been diagnosed ADD or ADHD should be a national goal.

The following pronouncement makes a number of things clear: The 1994 Textbook of Psychiatry, published by the American Psychiatric Press, contains this review (Popper and Steingard): “Stimulants [such as Ritalin] do not produce lasting improvements in aggressivity, conduct disorder, criminality, education achievement, job functioning, marital relationships, or long-term adjustment.”

Parents should also wake up to the fact that, in the aftermath of the Littleton, Colorado, tragedy, pundits and doctors are urging more extensive “mental health” services for children. Fine, except whether you have noticed it or not, this no longer means, for the most part, therapy with a caring professional. It means drugs. It means the drugs I am discussing in this inquiry.

In December 1996, the US Drug Enforcement Agency held a conference on ADHD and Ritalin — “Stimulant Use in the Treatment of ADHD.” Surprisingly, it issued a sensible statement about drugs being a bad substitute for the presence of caring parents:

“[T]he use of stimulants [such as Ritalin] for the short-term improvement of behavior and underachievement may be thwarting efforts to address the children’s real issues, both on an individual and societal level. The lack of long-term positive results with the use of stimulants and the specter of previous and potential stimulant abuse epidemics, give cause to worry about the future. The dramatic increase in the use of methylphenidate [Ritalin] in the 1990s should be viewed as a marker or warning to society about the problems children are having and how we view and address them.”

The Brookhaven National Laboratory has studied Ritalin through PET scans. Lab researchers have found that the drug decreased the flow of blood to all parts of the brain by 20-30%.[emphasis added]

That is of course a very negative finding. It is a signal of danger.

But parents, teachers, counselors, principals, school psychologists know nothing about this. Nor do they know that cocaine produces the same blood-flow effect.

In his book, Talking Back to Ritalin, Peter Breggin expands on the drug’s effects: “Stimulants such as Ritalin and amphetamine… have grossly harmful impacts on the brain — reducing overall blood flow, disturbing glucose metabolism, and possibly causing permanent shrinkage or atrophy of the brain.” [emphasis added]

In the wake of the Littleton shootings, we find that “the American people” and lawyers and pundits and child psychologists are pointing the finger at Hollywood, at video games like Doom, at inattentive parents, and at the availability of guns. We have to wonder why almost no one is calling out these drugs.

Is it possible that the work of PR people is shaping the national response?

The PBS television series, The Merrow Report, produced in 1996 a program called “Attention Deficit Disorder: A Dubious Diagnosis?” The Educational Writer’s Association awarded the program first prize for investigative reporting in that year. I can recall no other piece of television journalism since the Vietnam war which has managed to capture on film government officials in the act of realizing that they have made serious mistakes.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMNhdvg8kgA&w=480&h=360]

John Merrow, the series’ host, explains that, unknown to the public, there has been “a long-term, unpublicized financial relationship between the company that makes the most widely known ADD medication [Ritalin] and the nation’s largest ADD support group.”

The group is CHADD, based in Florida. CHADD stands for Children and Adults with ADD. Its 650 local chapters sponsor regional conferences and monthly meetings, often held at schools. It educates thousands of families about ADD and ADHD and gives out free medical advice. This advice features the drug Ritalin.

Since 1988, when CHADD and Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), the manufacturer of Ritalin, began their financial relationship, Ciba has given almost a million dollars to CHADD, helping it to expand its membership from 800 to 35,000 people.

Merrow interviews several parents whose children are on Ritalin, parents who have been relying on CHADD for information. They are clearly taken aback when they learn that CHADD obtains a significant amount of its funding from the drug company that makes Ritalin.

CHADD has used Ciba money to promote its pharmaceutical message through a public service announcement produced for television. Nineteen million people have seen this PSA. As Merrow says, “CHADD’s name is on it, but Ciba Geigy paid for it.”

It turns out that in all of CHADD’s considerable literature written for the public, there is rare mention of Ciba. In fact, the only instance of the connection Merrow could find on the record was a small-print citation on an announcement of a single CHADD conference.

In recounting CHADD’s promotion of drug “therapy” for ADD, Merrow says, “CHADD’s literature also says psychostimulant medications [like Ritalin] are not addictive.”

Merrow brings this up to Gene Haslip, a Drug Enforcement Agency official in Washington. Haslip is visibly annoyed. “Well,” he says, “I think that’s very misleading. It’s [Ritalin’s] certainly a drug that can cause a very high degree of dependency, like all of the very potent stimulants.”

Merrow reveals that CHADD received a $750,000 grant from the US Dept. of Education, in 1996, to produce a video, Facing the Challenge of ADD. The video doesn’t just mention the generic name methylphenidate, it announces the drug by its brand name, Ritalin. This, at government (taxpayer) expense.

We see a press conference announcing the release of the video. The CHADD president presents an award to Dr. Thomas Hehir, Director of Special Education Programs at the US Dept. of Education.

This sets the stage for a conversation between Merrow and Dr. Hehir, providing a rare moment when discovery of the truth is recorded on camera, when PR is swept aside.

MERROW: “Are you aware that most of the people in the film [the video, Facing the Challenge of ADD—referring to people who are giving testimonials about how their ADD children have been helped by treatment] are not just members of CHADD … but in the CHADD leadership, including the former national president? They’re all board members of CHADD in Chicago. Are you aware of that? They’re not identified in the film.”

HEHIR: “I’m not aware of that.”

MERROW: “Do you know about the financial connection between CHADD and Ciba Geigy, the company that makes Ritalin?”

HEHIR: “I do not.”

MERROW: “In the last six years, CHADD has received $818,000 in grants from Ciba Geigy.”

HEHIR: “I did not know that.”

MERROW: “Does that strike you as a potential conflict of interest?”

HEHIR: “That strikes me as a potential conflict of interest. Yes it does.”

MERROW: “Now, that’s not disclosed either. Even though the film talks about Ritalin as a—one way, and it’s the first way presented—of taking care of treating Attention Deficit Disorder. That’s not disclosed either. Does that trouble you?”

HEHIR: “Um, it concerns me.”

MERROW: “Are you going to look into this, when you go back to your office?”

HEHIR: “I certainly will look into some of the things you’ve brought up.”

MERROW: “Should they have told you that all those people in that film are CHADD leadership? Should they have told you that CHADD gets twenty percent of its money from the people who make Ritalin?”

HEHIR: “I should have known that.”

MERROW: “They should have told you.”

HEHIR: “Yes.”

This funded video, in which CHADD devotes all of twenty seconds to mentioning Ritalin’s adverse effects, is no longer distributed by the US Department of Education.

CHADD has now told its members that it receives funding from Ciba. It says it will continue to take money from Ciba.

This is an example of how a corporation can, behind the scenes, bend and shape the way the public sees reality.

In the case of the school shootings, has an attempt been made to mold media response? To highlight various causes and omit others?

Real action is going to have to come from the public. Mothers in Littleton and Springfield and West Paducah and Jonesboro [where school shootings occurred] are going to have to ask the hard questions and become relentless about getting real answers. They are going to have to learn about these drugs. They’ll have to learn which violent children in the school shootings were on these drugs. They are going to have to throw off robotic obedience to authorities in white coats. And they are going to have to join together.

If they do, many people will end up standing with them.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.