Likewise, in the eighteenth century parents could appeal to the king to confine a child in the Bastille by means of a lettre de cachet. In the nineteenth century the same situation appeared in America. In 1865 the Boston Times Messager described the  McLean Hospital as “a Bastille for the incarceration of some persons obnoxious to their relatives.”

This apparently bizarre history could be comprehended if we see psychiatry not as medical science, but as an extralegal system of penalties that favors the status quo: parents and husbands. In the 1850s an Illinois commitment statute indicated:

Married women may be entered or detained in the hospital (the state asylum of Jacksonville ) at the request of the husband without evidence of insanity required in other cases [emphasis added].

In the twentieth century psychiatry gained more power and influence in Western civilization due to a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry acting within the laws of supply and demand. The key word is demand. When family problems arise the parents, not the children, have the economic means to hire professionals.  It is convenient for psychiatrists to see family problems as medical problems, and they have deceived themselves to see family problems that way. Pediatrician Robert Mendelssohn observed: “teens are big business for psychiatrists.”  Psychiatrists do not defend children from abusive parents; that would put them in conflict with the parents, the source of income of the psychiatrist. Paul Fink, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), put it bluntly:  “It is the task of the APA to protect the earning power of psychiatrists.

That psychiatrists have played the role of advocates of parents and the status quo can be seen with the psychiatric diagnoses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

When slavery was legal in the United States Dr. Samuel Cartwright discovered that slaves who ran away from their masters suffered from drapetomania, a disease that afflicted blacks who had “an insane desire to run away from their owners.”  Other blacks suffered from the medical disease dyasthesia Aethiopica whose pathological symptom was “paying no attention to property.”  Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry also discovered various nervous diseases. He called one of them anarchia, “the excess passion for liberty.”  Rush’s portrait still appears on the official seal of the APA.

The diagnoses drapetomania and dyasthesia Aethiopica for blacks; anarchia for freethinkers and folie lucide for liberated women seem ludicrous today. Moral consciousness has evolved and the essentially political character of the labels and the role of psychiatrists as agents of those in power are all too clear. However, values have barely evolved regarding children. To label “ADHD” on a child that does not pay attention in compulsive schooling or “oppositional” a rebellious teenager is psychiatric stigma. The stigmatizing of today is done for the same motives against runaway blacks or the liberated women of yore.

In 1987 psychiatrists literally voted into existence the “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” (ADHD), basically a list of unwanted child behaviors at traditional schools or at traditional homes. ADHD was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the “Bible” of the psychiatric profession.  The following year half a million children around the world were diagnosed with the new disorder.

The psychiatric drug Ritalin (methylphenidate) was synthesized since the 1950s. But the so-called ADHD epidemic grew from 150,000 children in 1970 to five million in 1997, and in the United States the production of metilphenidate increased 700% between 1990 and 1997. Pills of Ritalin or other stimulants are usually administered at home or at school. It is estimated that seven million children take metilphenidate or other stimulants in North America. A study has shown that in ten countries the consumption of psychostimulants increased 12 per cent each year from 1994 to 2000. Australia and New Zeeland were rated third in the use of these psychiatric drugs for children after the United States and Canada.  Consumption in Europe is relatively low but increasing. Psychiatric drugs are prescribed from 15 to 20 million children around the world. In addition to psychostimulants these drugs include anti-depressives, mood stabilizers, tranquillizers and even neuroleptics, described in the profession as chemical lobotomizers. At the beginning of the 21^st century Janssen started to distribute Concerta, a metilphenidate of prolonged action. A single pill keeps quiet a child for 24 hours: a postmodern form of chemical swaddling. And in 2004 Eli Lilly & Co. brandished Strattera: the newest drug to control kids. According to Gloria Tsuen, analyst of First Investors Corp in New York, the global market for psychiatric drugs for children is approximately 1.7 billons.

Terrance Woodworth speaking at Congress on behalf of the Drug Enforcement Administration, reported that the effect of cocaine, amphetamines and metilphenidate is undistinguishable among animals and humans. Woodworth reported several deaths of boys and girls that have been prescribed methylphenidate and other stimulants.  Though many other adverse effects have been reported in popular books and professional literature, these revelations have had little effect in the Ritalin business

The Hippocratic Oath does not permit such “practice.” It does not permit the “treatment” of children […] for “diseases” that are not real diseases. The Nuremberg Code does not permit the “treatment” of normal, disease-free children with addictive, dangerous, Schedule II drugs for profit. It does not permit deception and the abrogation of informed consent rights that is occurring today in virtually every case across the United States. This is criminal. It is child abuse. Nothing about it is the legitimate practice of medicine. It must be exposed. Those responsible for the fraud and deception must be exposed and held accountable.

The psychiatric labeling and drugging children and even toddlers means that humanity is still moving away from what Lloyd deMause has called the intrusive and the socializing modes of childrearing with its demand of blind obedience to parents, and compulsory schooling, in contrast to the helping mode and the free schooling of children. For instance, the American Psychiatric Association, which depends on pharmaceutical companies, has entered collaboration with an organization of parents in North America: the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI). NAMI’s position has been so extreme that it has approved the lobotomy of their children