Totalitarian medicine. The invention of the ADHD epidemic and the forced drugging of schoolchildren summon memories of the Soviet Union.(Education)

Whatever the rationale, forcing people, particularly children, to take dangerous psychotropic drugs is a totalitarian practice. The use of state-imposed psychiatric treatment--including the forcible administration of mind-altering drugs--was one of the most terrifying practices used against political dissidents in the former Soviet Union.

Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky spent 12 years in the gulag, including a stint in the psihuska (psychiatric prison). In his memoir To Build a Castle, Bukovsky recalls that the regime "figured that it was impossible for people in a socialist society to have an anti-socialist consciousness." According to Soviet dogma, socialism satisfied all human needs; thus "criminality was impossible." By that reasoning, Soviet dissidents were not criminals, but madmen who had to be forcibly "cured" of their dementia. This is why "special psychiatric hospitals began to spring up like mushrooms" under Khrushchev's reign.

Shortly after being imprisoned in the psihuska, a state psychiatrist "tried to prove to us that we really were crazy: first, because we had come into conflict with society, whereas a normal person adapts to society; and second, because we had risked our freedom for the sake of stupid ideas, neglecting the interests of our families and careers," wrote Bukovsky. Decreed…