Thomas Szasz o ADHD, přepis

Thomas Szasz o ADHD, přepis

When school authorities tell a mother, as you already heard, that her son is sick and needs to be on drugs, how, in the world, is she to know that, that is simply a lie? How is she to recognize that what experts now call Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is simply not a disease? Now, such a mother is not an expert in the history of psychiatry. She does not know that psychiatrists have for hundreds of years used diagnostic terms – so-called diagnostic terms – to stigmatize and control people.

I will only give you a few dramatic examples.
When black slaves in the South ran away to freedom it wasn't that they wanted to be free: they suffered from a disease called drapetomania – from drapetes, runaway slave, and mania. I'm not making this up: this was a legitimate diagnosis, just like Attention Deficit Disorder is.
Women, half the population of mankind, of course, if they were foolish enough to rebel against domination by man, well then they had a serious disease called hysteria, which was due to their wandering womb.

Now, none of those behaviors was ever a disease and, of course, is not a disease. Nor is Attention Deficit Disorder a disease. No behavior or misbehavior is a disease or can be a disease! That's not what diseases are!

So it doesn't matter how a child behaves. There is nothing to examine! If he's sick then there must be some objective science to it, which can be diagnosed by physicians and objective tests. The soon as you go to a doctor, they take a lot of blood and take x-rays. They don't want to hear how you behave.

When I went to medical school, sixty years ago, they were only a handful of mental diseases; I think there were no more than six or seven. Now there are more than three hundred. And new ones are, quotes, discovered every day. Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment. I have long maintained that the child psychiatrist is one of the most dangerous enemies not only of children, but of adults, of all of us who care to the most precious and most vulnerable things in life. And those two things are children and liberty.

Now I ask again: How can parents protect their children from the therapeutic state, that is from the alliance of government and psychiatry? Basically, I think in the final analysis that they can only do so by disabusing themselves, getting rid of the idea that what ails an unhappy and misbehaving child – and there are of course many such children, in fact all children at sometime – that such a child is having a mental illness and the so-called treatment can help him. This is simply not so.

Diseases are malfunctions of the human body: of the heart, the liver, the kidney, the brain and so forth. Typhoid fever is a disease. You all know that, you don't question that. Spring fever… (smích) All you have to know is English! Spring fever is not a disease. Now why not? Because we all know that it's a figure of speech, a metaphor, a little piece of poetry. Now, so are all mental diseases. Mental disease is a metaphor.

The task we set ourselves, to combat psychiatric coercion, is important. I think it's important, you all think, it's important. Not enough people think it's important. It's a noble task. A task in the pursued of which we must, regardless of obstacles, persevere. Our conscience commands that we do no less.

Projev je zde:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQegsqYhuZE&list=PLTZUAi7pL1EfSv_RK2k8ntIywj8mcslHF&index=4