This site offers an alternative perspective to the bio-psychiatric industry, and to the millions of psychotropic prescriptions written for children and adults.

We really do have natural, built-in ways of psychological healing. With attention and adequate resource, anyone can reemerge from even the greatest distress and most extreme states of mind.

Wildest Colts Resources. Support for adults in their work with young people, especially in challenging situations. Defense of parents from coercion, and young people from labeling and drugs.

Does your child have ADHD? (video)

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Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD has been an adult & child neurologist, in private practice, for 35 years. Making "disease" (real diseases–epilepsy, brain tumor, multiple sclerosis, etc.) or "no disease" (emotional, psychological, psychiatric) diagnoses daily, he has discovered and described real, bona fide diseases.

It is this particular medical and scientific background that has led him to view the "epidemic" of one particular "disease"–Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)–with increasing alarm. Dr. Baughman describes this himself. Referring to psychiatry, he says:

"They made a list of the most common symptoms of emotional discomfiture of children; those which bother teachers and parents most, and in a stroke that could not be more devoid of science or Hippocratic motive–termed them a ‘disease.’ Twenty five years of research, not deserving of the term ‘research.,’ has failed to validate ADD/ADHD as a disease. Tragically–the "epidemic" having grown from 500 thousand in 1985 to between 5 and 7 million today–this remains the state of the ’science’ of ADHD."

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When parents hear me say that attention deficit disorder is a myth, they sometimes become very upset. They think I’m saying that their kids aren’t jumpy, distractible, forgetful, impulsive, or disorganized. That’s not what I’m saying at all. It’s quite obvious to me that our nation’s children have probably never been so hyperactive. The question is, what accounts for this? Is it a medical disorder called ADD (or ADHD as it’s sometimes called)? I think not. I think instead that what we’ve learned to call ADD is instead a number of things all jumbled up together under this simplistic label.

Kids can be hyperactive for any number of reasons: because they’re anxious or depressed, because they’re allergic to milk, because they’re bored with school, because they have a different kind of mind and aren’t being challenged, because they’re over-stimulated from television and video games. I could go on. The point is that the ADD label makes is too easy to ignore what might be going on beneath the surface of things. "Oh, he has ADD? Whew! Glad we know what the problem is now." But perhaps we don’t really know at all.

Although there is a great deal of support from the medical and scientific community for ADD, once one looks into the literature, things become less clear. Nobody can actually tell you, for example, how many kids have ADD. Though the literature traditionally says 3-5% of all children have ADD, I’ve seen statistics in textbooks that have ranged from .019% (in England where its far less common) to 10% and above. ADD is in the eyes of the beholder.

Many of the "tests" that are used to diagnose ADD are flawed. The behavior rating scales that ask parents to rate their kids on a scale from I to 5, for instance, in terms of hyperactivity, impulsivity and so forth, are very subjective and parents and teachers often don’t agree on what they see in the same child. The continuous performance tests that are often used to diagnose for ADD are a joke. One of them is a box that sits on a table. The child is told that random numbers will appear in a screen on the box. They are instructed to press the button below the screen whenever a 9 is followed by a 1. What a stupid task! Yet on the basis of this, children are being diagnosed and having their medication levels adjusted.

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Imagine for a moment that you are visiting a plant nursery. You hear a commotion outside, so you investigate. You find a young assistant struggling with a rose bush – he is trying to force open the petals of a rose, and muttering in frustration. You ask him what he is doing, and he explains, "My boss wants all these roses to bloom this week, so last week I taped all the early ones, and now I’m opening the late ones." You protest that every rose has it’s own schedule of blooming; it is absurd to try to slow down or speed this up; it doesn’t matter when roses bloom; a rose will always bloom at its own best time. You look at the rose again, and see that it is wilting. But when you point this out, he replies, "Oh, too bad, it has genetic dysbloomia. I’ll have to call an expert." "No, no!" you say, "you caused the wilting! All you needed to do was meet the flowers’ needs for water and sunshine, and leave the rest to nature!" You can’t believe this is happening. Why is his boss so unrealistic and uninformed about roses?

Such a scene would never take place in a nursery, of course, but it happens daily in our schools. Teachers, pressured by their bosses, follow official timetables, which demand that all children learn at the same rate, and in the same way. Yet children are no different than roses in their development: they are born with the capacity and desire to learn, they learn at different rates, and they learn in different ways. If we can meet their needs, provide a safe, nurturing environment, and keep from interfering with our doubts, anxieties, and arbitrary timetables, then – like roses – they will all bloom at their own best time.

My heart goes out to those children who have been labeled "ADHD" ("attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder"), the latest "learning disability" label. Many educators and researchers believe that these children and their families have been cruelly deceived by the use of these labels. Dr. Thomas Armstrong, a former learning disabilities specialist, changed professions when he "began to see how this notion of learning disabilities was handicapping all of our children by placing the blame for a child’s learning failure on mysterious neurological deficiencies in the brain instead of on much needed reforms in our system of education." Dr. Armstrong turned instead to the concept of learning differences, and wrote In Their Own Way, a fascinating and practical guide to seven "personal learning styles" first proposed by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner. Dr. Armstrong urges us to abandon convenient but harmful labels such as "dyslexia" and focus on the real problem of "dysteachia". He warns that "our schools are selling millions of kids short by writing them off as underachievers, when in reality they are disabled only by poor teaching methods."

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The reason I speak of a hoax in the case of "attention deficit disorder" is that there is no such "mental disorder" to "diagnose" and "treat." And the reason I speak of a great hoax is that the less competent medical practitioners use this phony "diagnosis" as a warrant to "treat" millions of school children (over 5,000,000) per year by intoxicating them with brain-disabling narcotics.

And make no mistake about the power of Ritalin to disable and eventually shrink the brain. It differs little in its destructive effects from cocaine and the amphetamines, and is fast becoming the drug of choice among addicts in high schools and colleges. Children in middle schools and high schools who are required to take Ritalin daily at school are now selling their pills to their friends who want to get a quick fix. Of late the victims of pill pushers are fast becoming pill pushers themselves!

Attention is a form of consciousness… and not something that can be observed.

Medical practitioners have chosen the word "attention" as the key to one of 400 or so "mental disorders" they’ve listed in their "diagnostic manual." They say that some children don’t "have" enough attention to succeed in school, and that it is wise to try to increase their attention with stimulant drugs. They say these children can’t pay attention even if they try to.

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Alice, the mother of a seven-year-old son, Nathan, recently visited my office for a counseling session. Nathan had reportedly been different and difficult from the beginning: exhibiting early seizure-like activity, a most challenging temperament, great sensitivity to various types of stimulation, intense frustration, aggressive tantrums, and other apparent developmental difficulties. Alice had taken him to doctors from a young age, obtaining a variety of mostly nonspecific diagnoses of developmental problems. Alice felt unappreciated as a parent, hurt and angry that the Montessori school her son had attended at ages four and five had ultimately rejected him. She felt judged by other parents, whom she felt blamed her for her son’s challenging behavior. And she felt unsupported by both camps of opinion regarding "medication": the pro-Ritalin forces challenged her reluctance to use the drug for her son, and the antidrug group vehemently urged her to resist drug use.

Alice’s personal stance on the Ritalin issue was clear. While she basically agreed that these "medications" are not good for children, she also felt that, in her family’s case, it had been helpful. Nathan had been diagnosed at age five with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and had taken Ritalin for a year. Alice thought the drug greatly helped her son, slowing him down enough so that he could listen and process information. She and her boyfriend both felt drugs made the boy much easier to be with; further, their own reduced stress eased them so much that they were now able to consider other alternatives for Nathan, such as nutritional supplementation.

Proponents of psychiatric drugs attest that they "work," meaning they alter mood, thought, and action. They also "work," of course, in that they assuage the medical community’s expectation that drugs be used to "treat" these children. I believe that fully informed adults should have every right to voluntarily use any drugs they wish, as long as they don’t endanger others in doing so. Children, however, are not able to give fully informed consent to drug use – especially those under six years of age, a group in whom we are witnessing a dramatic increase in psychiatric drug prescription.1 It is, therefore, our responsibility as adults to ensure every possible opportunity for optimal development for our children, to protect and defend our children from powerful toxic drugs, particularly those prescribed for psychiatric purposes.

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My heart goes out to those children who have been labeled "ADHD" ("attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder"), the latest "learning disability" label. Many educators and researchers now believe that these children and their families have been profoundly deceived by the use of these labels. Dr. Thomas Armstrong, a former learning disabilities specialist, changed professions when he "began to see how this notion of learning disabilities was handicapping all of our children by placing the blame for a child’s learning failure on mysterious neurological deficiencies in the brain instead of on much needed reforms in our system of education."

"ADD" and "ADHD" are fictions. They are nothing less than self-fulfilling pseudo-diagnoses, used as an excuse to give children powerful drugs so they can be fitted into the unnatural environment of a classroom. Overburdened teachers, and parents made anxious by the school institution have unrealistic and unfair expectations about what a "normal" child should be able to do. The high energy of many young children – especially boys – is normal for a healthy child. A child’s natural energy is something to celebrate, not a problem that we need to fix with mind-altering drugs. It is only a problem when we force children into a boring environment where they have little voice or power.

The abnormality is in the school, not in the child. It is normal and natural for a healthy child to be active and energetic, much more so than our society wants us to believe (see "The Child Who Never Sits Still" by Robert Mendelsohn).

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After close observation of their own children, with a combined age of 61 years, observations of many other children in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Israel, Greece, Italy, Swiss, France, Holland, Belgium, England, Scotland, and the Bahamas, and numerous reports throughout recorded history, the authors have determined that a widely-distributed behavioral disorder has somehow been overlooked by psychiatrists. They have labeled this disorder "CHILD"1. Just like "ADD", "ADHD", and "Asperger’s Syndrome", CHILD is not based on any medical evidence or test whatsoever, but it should nonetheless be a useful diagnosis for mental health professionals, school administrators, and parents.

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