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 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 BregginAdvocates of psychiatric drugs often claim that the medications improve learning and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy, but the contrary is true. There are no drugs that improve mental function, self-understanding, or human relations. Any drug that affects mental processes does so by impairing them.
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