Psychiatrists Invent Mental Disorders Like Lawmakers Invent Crimes

Posted By Jim Goad On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled

[1]1,241 words

I don’t want to frighten any of you legally-medicated speed freaks out there, but America is in the throes of an Adderall shortage [2]. Within days or possibly nanoseconds, tens of millions of you will have trouble concentrating and start acting hyperactively. This is because you will no longer have the proper medication to treat your totally authentic illness that has been diagnosed using rigorous standards by the entirely trustworthy scions of psychiatry, who only have our best interests in mind and would never do anything for personal profit [3]. These nice doctors would certainly never be the unwitting stooges of central planners who seek to keep the proles artificially placated and strung out on mind-altering substances.

Adderall is a composite of two forms of amphetamine. It doesn’t bear the wicked stigma of crystal meth, just as the word “Oxycontin” doesn’t conjure the same dread as its homeless prodigal cousin, heroin. Over 40 million prescriptions were written for Adderall last year, just as over 140 million scripts were written for legal opioids [4] in 2020. But for all you hear about the opioid crisis, according to the National Institute of Health Care Management [5] (NIHCM), “cocaine and methamphetamine are each now involved in more deaths than either prescription opioids or heroin.”

One of the countless ironies of being in prison was seeing the long beeline of ragged fuckups who’d been convicted of drug offenses waiting single-file at 4 PM for the nurse at the pill cart to feed them their state-mandated uppers and downers. Take the tiny paper cup with the pill in it . . . swallow the pill . . . open your mouth and show me your tongue . . . Good boy, you swallowed your meds.

Legal psychoactive drugs are much more insidious than illicit dope because they come with the imprimatur of the medical industry, which has never lied to us — not about vaccines, not about anything. Since these drugs are prescribed by a doctor, we can grind our jaws and clean all the tile grout out of the tub with a toothbrush at 4 AM secure in the knowledge that we have a legitimate medical illness that has been diagnosed using the scientific method. In no way will this cute little pill prematurely age us or lead to cardiac problems or brain damage like illegal amphetamines do.

Adderall is primarily prescribed to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), an “illness” which has no known etiology and can be legally diagnosed merely by answering– honestly or dishonestly — a series of questions. Just as clinical depression and anxiety are said to be caused by “chemical imbalances” but you aren’t required to take any blood tests to verify that you actually have an imbalance of said chemicals, ADHD is said to be a neurological problem, but you don’t need a brain scan to get a prescription for Adderall. All one needs to do to get prescribed an anti-depressant is to tell a doctor that you’ve been feeling sad, and all you need to get a prescription for Xanax is to confess to the doc that you’ve been feeling a trifle nervy lately. Likewise, all one needs to do to get a prescription for that sweet legal speed is to answer a series of questions claiming that you’ve been fidgety, have trouble concentrating, tend to tune people out when they’re talking to you, and sometimes don’t finish all your chores.

Despite the tens of millions of prescriptions written last year for Adderall, there has never been a definitive genetic or chemical cause found for ADHD. None. Some studies have shown that brain scans of people diagnosed with ADHD differ in some ways from normal brains. One study found some relatively consistent differences between normal people and those diagnosed with ADHD in levels of things such as urinary norepinephrine. But these studies were done after the test subjects’ brains had been soaked in curative amphetamines for a while, which reminded me of a recent study [6] that suggested selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) medication is actually the cause of, rather than the cure for, low serotonin. To my knowledge, no one has ever been diagnosed with ADHD after their brains were scanned or their urine was tested. The tests seem to follow after the diagnosis, which seems 180 degrees ass-backward to me.

[7]

You can buy Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto here. [8]

Even worse, with every new revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the diagnostic threshold for ADHD gets lower and lower. It seems that with every passing year, this “disease” grows hardier and it’s increasingly easy to “catch” it.

What could possibly be dangerous about administering a drug to children that has been demonstrated to stunt their growth [9]?

I’m endlessly flabbergasted at the specter of people who normally question authority but have no trouble believing everything the psychiatric industry declares. The unquestioning gullibility in believing that the majority of officially designated “mental illnesses” are legitimate medical disorders is astounding.

The problem with the very idea of “mental illness” is that it’s not a scientifically quantifiable thing; it’s a social construct. Just as how saying someone is a “narcissist” or a “sociopath” is merely an opinion and could never in a million lifetimes be empirically proven, saying someone has clinical depression or anxiety or hyperactivity is merely an observation, not a diagnosis, and their brains shouldn’t be pelted with mind-altering drugs based on what you suspect is going on with their neurons.

In his 2016 essay “ADHD: A Destructive Psychiatric Hoax [10],” Philip Hickey, Ph.D. writes:

Usually when people say or write that ADHD is “real,” they mean that this cluster of problems listed in the APA’s catalog (DSM) is a genuine, bona fide illness — just like diabetes; and that people who “have” this so-called illness must take their “medication” in the same way that diabetics must take insulin. . . . In psychiatry, the “diagnoses” are merely labels that psychiatrists assign to the loose clusters of vague problems, and have no explanatory value whatsoever. . . . The critical point being that in psychiatry, the only evidence for the “illness” is the very behavior it purports to explain. In other words:  your son is distracted because he is distracted.

Everyone feels a bit distracted or hyper from time to time. The eternal problem is deciding exactly when the condition gets so severe that it magically “becomes” ADHD. And since it’s a social construct, where the line gets drawn depends on the society in question. Societies that value obedience and submissiveness rather than curiosity and vigor would likely decide that many of its members “have” ADHD and therefore “require” medication.

Since boys get slapped with the ADHD diagnosis about two to four times as frequently as girls do — and more for “hyperactivity” and “impulsivity” than for an inability to concentrate — some speculate that dosing them with Adderall serves to crush the rambunctious male spirit. It’s preferable to have young boys sitting there placidly with their hands folded in their laps like the nice young little girls do. Men are diagnosed with the “illness” about 1.6 times more frequently than women are, which suggests that normal female behavior is the societal norm, whereas normal male behavior is evidence of neurological pathology — or at least a troubling level of non-conformity.

So much of this is massively subjective — which is fine if you’re evaluating poetry, but dangerously crazy if you’re talking about medicine.

If either psychiatrists or politicians actually cured the problems that plague individuals and societies, they’d quickly be out of a job. To keep themselves in business, psychiatrists invent mental disorders like lawmakers invent crimes.

Jim Goad [11]

*  *  *

Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.

To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:

Paywall Gift Subscriptions

[13]If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:

To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.