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 the state psychiatrist, "This ... is called an obsession with self, the first sign of a paranoid development of the personality." A steady stream of doctors and specialists hectored Bukovsky by repeatedly asking him the same questions: "Why was I in conflict with society and its accepted norms? Why did my beliefs seem of overwhelming importance to me--more important than my liberty, my studies, or my mother's peace of mind?"

Not surprisingly, many of Bukovsky's fellow inmates broke down. Others who resisted were treated to regular beatings. In one case, after an inmate was severely beaten, medical personnel listed his wounds as evidence that he had "become violent" and prescribed "injections of sulfazine or aminazine"--despite knowing how his wounds had been inflicted.

Bukovsky's account--minus the sadistic physical abuse--is somewhat similar to stories of American schoolchildren diagnosed with various behavioral and psychological problems, which supposedly only mind-altering drugs can cure.

A Contrived Epidemic

Granted, it may seem extreme to compare our public school system to the Soviet psychiatric gulag. But the logic used to justify the forcible drugging of ADHD children is reminiscent of the Soviet mind-set, which emphasized making the subject conform to the state's dictates by any means necessary--including blackmail, kidnapping, and the use of potentially deadly drugs. Furthermore, there is ample reason to believe that ADHD is a political artifice masquerading as a legitimate medical diagnosis.