Saturday, February 02, 2008

PEOPLE WITH ADHD WILL EXCEL BUT NOT IN NEW BRUNSWICK!!!


Ritalin
Originally uploaded by Oldmaison
Here in New Brunswick? Once a child is force on Ritalin?

Under the orders of the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission?

The kids will end up on Welfare because these idiots at the Commission told the Government that people with ADHD taking Ritalin are labeled close to mental retardation!!!

These kids are just bored to death!!!!

While there are several reasons for behavioral disruptiveness and emotional difficulties, rebellion against an oppressive environment is one common reason that is routinely not even considered by many mental health professionals. Why? It is my experience that many mental health professionals are unaware of how extremely obedient they are to authorities. Acceptance into medical school and graduate school and achieving a Ph.D. or M.D. means jumping through many meaningless hoops, all of which require much behavioral, attentional and emotional compliance to authorities -- even disrespected ones. When compliant M.D.s and Ph.D.s begin seeing noncompliant patients, many of these doctors become anxious, sometimes even ashamed of their own excessive compliance, and this anxiety and shame can be fuel for diseasing normal human reactions.

Two ways of subduing defiance are to criminalize it and to pathologize it, and U.S. history is replete with examples of both. In the same era that John Adams' Sedition Act criminalized criticism of U.S. governmental policy, Dr. Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry (his image adorns the APA seal), pathologized anti-authoritarianism. Rush diagnosed those rebelling against a centralized federal authority as having an "excess of the passion for liberty" that "constituted a form of insanity." He labeled this illness "anarchia."

Throughout American history, both direct and indirect resistance to authority has been diseased. In an 1851 article in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright reported his discovery of "drapetomania," the disease that caused slaves to flee captivity. Cartwright also reported his discovery of "dysaesthesia aethiopis," the disease that caused slaves to pay insufficient attention to the master's needs. Early versions of ODD and ADHD?

In Rush's lifetime, few Americans took anarchia seriously, nor was drapetomania or dysaesthesia aethiopis taken seriously in Cartwright's lifetime. But these were eras before the diseasing of defiance had a powerful financial ally in Big Pharma.

In every generation there will be authoritarians. There will also be the "bohemian bourgeois" who may enjoy anti-authoritarian books, music, and movies but don't act on them. And there will be genuine anti-authoritarians, who are so pained by exploitive hierarchies that they take action. Only occasionally in American history do these genuine anti-authoritarians actually take effective direct action that inspires others to successfully revolt, but every once in a while a Tom Paine comes along. So authoritarians take no chances, and the state-corporate partnership criminalizes anti-authoritarianism, pathologizes it, markets drugs to "cure" it and financially intimidates those who might buck the system.

It would certainly be a dream of Big Pharma and those who favor an authoritarian society if every would-be Tom Paine -- or Crazy Horse, Tecumseh, Emma Goldman or Malcolm X -- were diagnosed as a youngster with mental illness and quieted with a lifelong regimen of chill pills. The question is: Has this dream become reality?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If its dead its dead.
English again rears superior in montreal.

JAN RAVENSBERGEN, The Gazette
Published: 7 hours ago
Young people predominated yesterday afternoon as a feisty crowd of about 60 protesters waving Quebec flags gathered outside the downtown Montreal office of Quebec Premier Jean Charest.

With the help of a bullhorn, they complained that French is being given short shrift in Quebec's largest city.

Individual protesters condemned Charest's language policies - calling for the resignation of Culture Minister Christine


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Font:****St-Pierre and of France Boucher, head of the Office québécois de la langue française, Quebec's language watchdog.

Among the slogans they most frequently shouted was: "Charest vendu!" That most accurately translates as: "Charest sellout!"

Unless provincial authorities act on what François Gendron labelled a "linguistic crisis," he said, "we risk starting to speak Frenglish in Quebec in the next couple of years."

Gendron, 25, is the main spokesperson for Les Jeunes Patriotes du Québec, the protest's organizer. Well over half the crowd appeared to be under 30.

After milling around for 45 minutes at their sidewalk rallying point on McGill College Ave., just south of the main entrance of McGill University, the protesters headed east along Sherbrooke St. W., toward the Montreal site of the government language office.

janr@thegazette.canwest.com