Much of psychiatry is a scam. Other than organic/structural/chemical brain damage, there may be no such thing as mental illness, as Thomas Szasz strongly argues in his book, The Myth of Mental Illness. Nevertheless, governments in many countries, especially ours, have latched onto the idea of mental illness as a way to control behavior. The height of psychiatric idiocy is the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition), a list of psychiatric disorders. Many of these so-called disorders are behaviors that some shrink or psychologist does not approve of, and therefore gives those behaviors nasty sounding names that beg for treatment; e.g., Oppositional Defiant Disorder, a situation where a child objects strongly to some parental or parental figure’s commands. In other words, a highly spirited, non-conforming child. In many cases, children showing strongly independent behavior are not only classifed as having a mental disorder, they are then drugged into "appropriate" behavior. Public schools make money by diagnosing kids as mentally ill; they get funds from the federal government for every kid diagnosed and treated.

Psychiatric treatment no longer is mainly verbal and discussive. The transference reaction now is literally transferring some chemicals from a bottle or a syringe into the patient’s blood stream. The relationship between the doctor and patient has turned into the relationship between the drug manufacturer, its psychiatrists and their victims, us and our children. In large part, the focus on diagnosing young children and treating them with anti-psychotic drugs formerly restricted to adults comes from the Harvard Psychiatry Dept. and particularly from Dr. Joseph Biederman in that department. Now it turns out that Biederman and several colleagues took large amounts of money (millions of dollars) from the drug companies that manufacture anti-psychotics pushed by Biederman et al. onto our kids. In my view, the situation is immoral and horrible. We are making inappropriate wrong diagnoses based on inadequate criteria and then labeling our kids as mentally ill and forcing drugs upon them. Parents without MD degrees think the doctors must be right and cannot rationally argue with them. But even if the doctors were right, how does that justify browbeating parents into accepting the forcing of drugs into their children’s bodies when no one knows what the long term effects of the drugs are and many people question whether psychiatric diagnoses of young children mean anything at all? If any class of people should be treated very conservatively it is children. So many developmental processes are going on in them that any outside agents like powerful anti-psychotic drugs should not be given to them for fear of damaging physical or mental development. But money rules in academia. Those with the government grants or private outside support get to be the big shots and influence everyone else’s academic behavior. Usually the victims of academia are other academics. In this case, the victims are at least one generation of our children and the ignorant adults who should be protecting them from people like Biederman and the bureaucrats who want to drug our kids into obeying them.