The USA is the home of ADHD child drugging with at least 2.7 million children currently taking ADHD ‘medications’.[1] As American psychologist Dr Leonard Sax points out, given that many of the supposed benefits of medication for ADHD children relate to education, ‘you would expect American children to be racing ahead in their school work’; but as it is, ‘France, Germany, and Japan continue to maintain their traditional lead over the United States in tests of math and reading ability’.[2] Similarly, if ADHD drugs worked, measures of social functioning like juvenile crime rates would be lower in countries with high prescribing rates like the US. Clearly America’s ‘medicated’ children are not doing so well.
Australia should hardly be using America as the ‘model’ for enhancing the welfare of children. However, the reliance of Australian psychiatric practice on imported American Psychiatric Association (APA) diagnostic criteria, over which the Australian medical profession has no control, leaves Australian consumers, particularly children, vulnerable to the same forces that make America the home of indiscriminate psychiatric drugging.
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