If you've heard Hillary Clinton's recent remarks on Ritalin and other drug use on children, you'll find the usual nauseating demagoguery. She appears to be urging Ritalin caution; but, if you listen carefully, she's calling it a miracle drug: "A Godsend for emotional and behavioral problems, for both children and their parents." She insists her efforts are not an attack on the medical treatment of children's emotional well-being because the drugs are very, very "useful."
Peter BregginThere is nothing worse that you can do to a human being in America today than give them a mental illness kind of label and tell them they need drugs and these children are 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years-old being treated in this manner.
Peter BregginI think that's a major reason. Instead of turning in their own lives to philosophy, religion, love, family life, or nature, they think of psychiatry; and today that means the "pill" as an ultimate answer. Also, if you have a desire for social control, "benevolent" control and "benevolent" authority, then again biological psychiatry offers a tremendous opportunity.
Peter BregginIt's going to get even worse if Hillary [Clinton] follows her plan that I describe in Reclaiming Our Children. But even now in many, many schools the nurses are giving out more drugs than were given out in children's mental hospitals when I was in training. You can go into a school today and find that ten or twenty percent of the boys are on drugs given by the school nurse. I just recently visited a school where over half of the children were being given drugs.
Peter BregginI think that one of the things that has happened is that psychiatry has become the religion of liberalism.
Peter BregginIn part I'm just mystified. Here's a woman, Hillary [Clinton], who wrote a book about it takes a "village" to raise children. It wasn't about a book about "it takes a pill." There's a "double think" that the modern person often has. Anything that's called "science" is accepted as an absolute and sweeps reason away.
Peter Breggin