A Response From a "1000 Parents of Light"
A Response From a "1000 Parents of Light"//Mental-Health Rip-Offs Explained
Quote:
>Greetings;
> Having spent some time searching newsgroups today and several others,
> I was fortunate enough to come across your posting fairly early.
> Like the sir in the article, I to am a concerned father of a son
> diagnosed with ADD. Likewise I also find it very disturbing how easily
> and how common this Ritalin is prescribed and advocated by most
> educational arenas. From daycare (in the guise of trying to curb disruptive
> behavior at an early as possible age) to the elementary school. It puts a
> crack in my glass filled with hope to think that the people teaching
>my son are teaching him to also think with a narrow, closed mind.
>Fortunately we decided to stop giving Ritalin them to him fairly early.
>Christ!!! They started him at the ripe old age of 4. So we, after
>seeing how he reacted to Ritalin, tried them ourselves to know what he was
>really going through. It was not all that pleasant.
> So what we were really interested in was the information that you found
>and hope to become one of the 1 mil. parents of an ADD child not on
>Ritalin.
Thank you very much for your important letter. Although the subjects of ADD and ADHD
can be very complex and sometimes controversial, I will give you some resources so you
can continue your research on these subjects . I understand those feelings concerning
the drugging your child at the tender age of four, and I agree with your outrage.
In the 1980's the psychiatric industry made a scandalous claim that over a lifetime,
one-third of Americans will need some psychiatric care. Federal officials with close
ties to this psychiatric industry overbuilt and overspent on psychiatric hospitals,
furthermore, way more doctors went into psychiatry then were really needed. The
psychiatric industry claimed that "sixty million Americans--including twelve million
children--require psychiatric services," most of it involving hospitalization.
During the Reagan years, the revenues of private psychiatric hospitals in this
country--not counting the psychiatric facilities in general hospitals--jumped from $1
billion to nearly $7 billion. As the mental health care boom took off, psychiatrists
at some private hospitals were making between $600,000 and $900,000 a year.
Public programs serving people with mental illnesses absorb about $20 billion a year,
and, as the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill warns, that because there is so
little auditing or oversight of the spending, "it is a situation ready made for theft."
Since the Johnson presidency, when {*filter*} replaced confinement in state mental hospitals
and thousands of inmates were turned out on the streets, the government has sponsored
community health centers for the purpose of helping people who, though seriously ill,
need not be restrained. Since then, billions of dollars have been handed out to build,
staff and operate the centers--and most of this money has been wasted or worse. The
organizations that got construction grants swore they would provide five basic services
for twenty years. Investigators found that of the nearly 600 groups that gobbled up
the federal dollars, only thirty were operating as Congress had intended.
The biggest rip-off has taken place not in these community centers but in private
psychiatric hospitals and in general hospitals psychiatric wings. With at least 40
percent of all public and private hospital beds occupied by psychiatric and substance
abuse patients, mental health is by far the largest single revenue source. Four big
national corporations account for seven out of ten for-profit psychiatric beds in the
United States, and the industry only helps the cases who have insurance.
At some psychiatric hospitals, the patients were {*filter*}agers whose only sign of mental
problems was that they had failed to do their homework or had sassed their parents.
The cure for such terrible problems wasn't cheap. A survey by the "Wall Street
Journal" put the average per case billing for psychiatric care for an adolescent at
$18,000--far more than most serious medical treatments such as major surgery. Kids are
great business, in part because it actually costs less to treat them than {*filter*}s.
Some books about the health care system in general are:
*Profit Fever: The Drive to Corporatize Health Care and How To Stop It. By Charles
Andrews. Common Courage Press. 1995
*The Serpent on the Staff: The Unhealthy Politics of the American Medical Association.
By Howard Wolinsky and Tom Brune. Tarcher/Putnam 1994
*The Great White Lie: Dishonesty, Waste, and Incompetence in the Medical community. By
Walt Bogdanich. Touchstone 1991
*Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains. By Dave Lindroff.
Bantam 1992
*Beyond Crisis: Confronting Health Care in the United States. Edited by Nancy F.
McKenzie. Meridan 1994
*The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and
the Making of a Vast Industry. By Paul Starr. Basic 1982.
Books on ADD and ADHD
* The Myth of the ADD Child - Dr. Thomas Armstrong
*A Family of Values - John Rosemond
*Normal Children Have Problems Too- Stanley Turecki
