Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD has been an adult & child neurologist, in private practice, for 35 years. Making "disease"(real diseases—epilepsy, brain tumor, multiple sclerosis, etc.) or "no disease" (emotional, psychological, psychiatric) diagnoses daily, he has discovered and described real, bona fide diseases. It is this particular medical and scientific background that has led him to view the "epidemic" of one particular "disease"--Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)--with increasing alarm. Dr. Baughman describes this himself. Referring to psychiatry, he says:

Dear Dr. Satcher,

Releasing your Report on Mental Health (December 13, 1999), you alleged:

Mental illness is no different than diabetes, asthma or other physical ailments.Mental illnesses are physical illnesses.We know the chemical disorders we are treating.

Having gone to medical school and studied pathology--disease, then, diagnosis, you and I, and all physicians, know that the presence of any bona fide disease, like diabetes, cancer, or epilepsy is confirmed by an objective finding--a physical or chemical abnormality. No demonstrable physical or chemical abnormality: no disease! You also know, I am sure, that there is no physical or chemical abnormality to be found, in life, or at autopsy in "depression, bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses." Why, then, are you telling the American people that "mental illnesses" are "physical" and that they are due to "chemical disorders"?

Patients with psychological/psychiatric symptoms, some needing referral to a mental health professional, are derived from among those determined by non-psychiatric physicians to have "no disease"; no physical or chemical abnormality. Psychiatrists do not perform physical examinations or neurological examinations (that by which disease of the brain and nervous system is determined to be present or absent). That this is the case, makes their claims of diagnosing and treating "biologically based brain diseases", all the more unbelievable. Psychiatrists and psychologists, using interviews and pencil-and-paper psychometric tests, who tell patients they have diagnosed a physical state or disease, are charlatans.

In what appears to be a further attempt to represent mental disorders as actual diseases, you say:

Mental disorders are not character flaws but are legitimate illnesses that respond to specific treatments, just as other health conditions.Mental illness includes a variety of disorders characterized by alterations in thinking, like Alzheimer's disease; in mood, like depression, or in behavior, like hyperactivity.

Here, you disavow that our character and our emotional selves are shaped by parents, teachers, peers, hunger, want, fun, kindness, discipline, and whether or not we are given the essential tool of reading. You seem to be saying that however we misbehave or whatever painful emotion we experience, we have a disease, and there is medical treatment for it-a drug.

What is your purpose in co-mingling Alzheimer's disease, an actual disease with known microscopic abnormalities of the brain with "depression" and "hyperactivity" which are normal occurrences in normal children and adults? It is a common semantic strategy, of modern-day psychiatry to co-mingle actual brain diseases, like Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases with mental conditions, in hopes that the public will view all of them as diseases in need of medical treatment-drug treatment.

Further, you propose:

that people with mental health problems and mental illnesses can live happier, more productive lives with the help of therapy and medication.

Surely you noticed, as you reviewed the psychiatric drug literature, that there is virtually no such thing as a long-term study. Most drug trials last just a few weeks to a few months. And yet they give the impression that safety and efficacy are assured. Psychiatric research does not address the long term. Whether or not any psychiatric drug, or combination of drugs, makes us more adaptable and efficient over the long-term, or the life-span, is simply not known and should not be urged upon the public as though it were. All such drugs are brain-altering and brain-damaging and cannot but have a damaging, deleterious effect over the long term. Consider the 10 percent brain atrophy in children on long-term Ritalin/stimulant therapy. And this is not to mention the invariable, stigmatizing effects of psychiatric labeling and life as a psychiatric patient-in-perpetuity.

You add:

My hope is that the report will be a turning point in how this nation views mental illness.

You would have the nation believe-as is totally inconsistent with medical science-- that mental illnesses are due to demonstrable physical/chemical abnormalities of the brain and that medical treatment, that is, psychiatric drug treatment, is the only logical remedy. Remarkably enough, this message corresponds with the lynch-pin of psychopharm cartel marketplace propaganda.

An ad placed by "America's Pharmaceutical Research Companies," in Newsweek, October 7, 1996, reads:

A chemical that triggers mental illness is now being used to stop it. Drugs that act on this chemical in the brain are used to treat schizophrenia and psychosis.

Such is the "big lie" of biopsychiatry, weaving illusions of diseases of the brain (pathology--objective abnormalities of organs, tissues, cells seen by microscope, electron microscope) and biochemistry (high blood sugar in diabetes, galactose in galactosemia; phenylalanine in phenylketonuria-bona fide chemical imbalances).

The ad continues:

A chemical that triggers mental illness.Drugs that act on this chemical.Scientists now know the causes of schizophrenia and psychosis are often rooted in powerful chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters.One of these neurotransmitters is dopamine. Schizophrenia and psychosis can result when the brain has abnormal dopamine levels.Because of recent advances, drugs that are able to alter dopamine levels free many patients from the terrible effects of mental illness."

Herein the psychopharm cartel claims that schizophrenia and psychosis can result from abnormal levels of dopamine, also that they have drugs that can preferentially alter dopamine levels and "free many patients from the terrible effects of mental disease". They have the audacity to blatantly lie to the American people-would-be patients, consumers of their drugs, even though no confirmatory, characteristic, physical or chemical abnormality is known to exist, in schizophrenia, or in any psychiatric disease; even when the specific brain chemicals effected by their drugs, remains wholly theoretical and unproven.

Having failed to prove or verify a biologic/organic cause for schizophrenia, organic or any pure "mental illness", why are they allowed to persist with their claims of "disease"?

Having claimed a chemical "imbalance," they, just as quickly, claim to have the "chemical balancer".. This is the "line" of biopsychiatry--in bed with the pharmaceutical industry. Without an illusion of a disease; a chemical imbalance, they would have nothing for which to prescribe their "chemical balancer", their drug.

Not having proven that mental illnesses are anything biologic/organic, i.e., real diseases, they have failed at the same time to prove that the symptoms of the "mental illnesses" or which they speak are other than situational or environmental in origin, the result of the rigors of life, at home, at school and on the job. With no proof whatsoever they tell you "it is in your brain" it isn't your fault, your boss's, teacher's or your parent's fault. Doing so, in the interests of selling their pills, they dissuade troubled persons from looking at and addressing life's real problems. What a truly duplicitous, evil, undertaking. It is a prescription which, if followed to the letter, is guaranteed to do net damage.

It is your duty as Surgeon General to convey the medical science of the day to all Americans, as well as the best possible advice on how to stay healthy. Intent, as you are in representing the "disorders" of the psychiatric/pharmaceutical cartel, as "diseases" you put the considerable weight of your office on the side of the psychiatric/pharmaceutical cartel, and squarely against the American people. It is said that no previous Surgeon General has ever issued a report on mental health. Your report is more "infomercial" than a report. A true, health-directed report from your office would have identified the contrived epidemics of psychiatry and the incredible dangers of the legal/licit drug epidemic. Twenty-eight of the 50 surgeon general's reports in U.S. history have concerned smoking, a true societal health hazard and epidemic. You might have spoken out on the Ritalin/stimulant poisoning of 6-7 million of our youth. I say poisoning, because all of these children are normal and psychiatry, pediatric, neurology and virtually all at the helm of medical academia and organized medicine, know it. I believe, Sir, that you know it too.

Laurie Flynn, executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) applauded your report, stating: `We've got a health crisis here and the surgeon general has documented it." By this, she no doubt means you've documented the "diseases" and the "epidemics". NAMI spokesman Bob Carolla said the group views mental illness as a disease, like diabetes or Alzheimer's, that can be treated most effectively with medications. Here, we have their motive for calling mental illnesses, "diseases" when not a single one of them is. Without contrived, invented, illusions of disease there would be nothing for which to prescribe the medications fast coming off the production line of the pharmaceutical industry. Carolla asserts: "Mental illness is a biologically based brain disorder.That's not to say that other factors can't affect mental illness, but the core problem is biologically based." Who are the physicians on their scientific advisory board that go along with their putting out this-the "neurobiological lie" ? Is NAMI a health care advocate as it would have the public believe? Having accepted $11.72 million from eighteen drug firms between 1996 and mid-1999, it is no less an arm of the pharmaceutical industry than is psychiatry itself. Eli Lilly will have delivered $1.1 million in quarterly installments, with the lion's share funding NAMI's "Campaign to End Discrimination" against the mentally ill-the mentally "diseased".

The Vice-President's wife, Tipper Gore, a long time advocate of the mentally ill, was at your side as you launched your Surgeon General's Report. In kicking off the recent White House conference on mental health (Associated Press, June 6, 1999), Mrs. Gore, perhaps deceived, pressed the "neurobiological" lie upon the American people:

One of the most widely believed and most damaging myths is that mental illness is a personal failure, not a physical disease. Nothing could be further from the truth.

On June 29,1999, I wrote to her:

You state exactly what the psychiatric and pharmaceutical cabal has claimed without benefit of science, namely, that psychiatric illnesses or disorders, are actual diseases. The basic difference between non-psychiatric physicians, and psychiatrists and psychologists, is that the former are charged with determining whether organic/physical, disease is present or not, while the latter do no such thing. We all, at one time or another have symptoms, that is, subjective complaints, but few, fortunately, are determined to have an actual disease or abnormality as a cause for those symptoms.everyone, regardless of qualifications or training, will, if asked, venture a "diagnosis," ignorant of the fact that without a physical or chemical abnormality there is no disease. It is due to this ignorance that the totally fraudulent, psychiatric "disease," ADHD has grown to the incredible extent that it has, said to be present in 30-40% in many classrooms across the country.. I sincerely hope that you, the Vice President, President and Mrs. Clinton, Attorney General Reno and all agencies of federal investigation will look critically at psychiatry's claims that they deal with actual diseases when they do not.

How long can their "ignorance" be excused?

In Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General, it is said that you have reviewed 3,000 academic studies on mental health and mental illness and has been in the works since you took office in early 1997. Another standard stratagem in biological psychiatry is to reference the sheer weight, volume, and longevity of the "scientific" literature on the psychiatric "disease" in question. This is commonplace in defense of the most common, fictitious disease of all-ADHD. But you and I and every scientific-minded physician, knows perfectly well that it only takes a single published report to validate a new, previously unrecognized disease. In 1971, I discovered CHANDS--the curly hair-anklyoblepharon (fused eyelids)-nail dysplasia syndrome. Its description was published in the Birth Defects, Original Article Series. In 1979, Toriello, et. al.(myself included) established its autosomal recessive mode of transmission and published our findings in the Journal of Medical Genetics . Here was a new disease described and validated in just one paper, and it's genetic cause and mode of transmission proven in a second.

The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual has grown from 112 mental disorders in its initial, 1952 edition to 163 in the 1968, DSM-II to 224 in the 1980, DSM-III , 253 in the 1987, DSM-III-R, and, 374 in the 1994, DSM-IV, and not a single one of them, no doubt mentioned in the 3000 studies you reviewed, has been validated as a bona fide disease, much less, as having a genetic basis. That there is more to this explosion of psychiatric "diseases" than scientific naiveté is obvious. To the extent that such research and its dissemination abrogates informed consent and becomes standard practice, it is fraud perpetrated upon the American people? That it is a joint, psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry strategy is obvious.

Why, have you chosen to be the first Surgeon General to issue a report on mental health? As I have shown, it has little or nothing to do with medical science, bona fide diseases or epidemics. Have other factors motivated you? You might have addressed the biggest, most heinous epidemic of all, that of mandating Ritalin and other addictive, dangerous, even deadly--amphetamines for 5-6 million entirely normal American children, as "treatment" for the wholly fraudulent psychiatric "disease", Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder--ADHD. While you should have no other agenda, it appears that you do. It appears that the entire Federal Government is in the business of deceiving the people in the interests getting them to accept voluntary as well as government-mandated, forced, psychotropic medications and psychiatric incarceration and care otherwise-all of it for invented fictitious diseases.

I have written to Attorney General Janet Reno (April, 15, 1998), to most members of the US Congress and Senate and to many at the National Institute of Mental Health, setting forth the elements of this fraud. Most courts across the country today hold these psychiatric "diseases" to be real; the withholding of "treatment" to be "negligent" warranting court-mandated treatment, be it for a child, against the will of their parents or for an adult, against their own, free will. I have written to supporters of Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorders-CHADD--Congressman Chris Shays, R-Connecticut, Senator, William Frist, R-Tennessee, himself a cardiovascular surgeon, and to NIMH director, Stephen Hyman, MD telling them of the fraud. But none have responded. Must they all believe in the illusion of ADHD as a disease? Is it only the untold millions from the all-powerful pharmaceutical industry, that "talks"? I find it impossible to come to any other conclusion.

A sure indication that the APA and the disease inventors of the DSM have gone to far, is to be found in the Talk Back column of Clinical Psychiatric News, January, 2000: It asks: "Has the DSM-IV gone to far in including psychiatric diagnoses on the fringe, such as those that do not have a demonstrated biological etiology?" "On the fringe" says Talk Back, ".those that do not have a demonstrated biological etiology?" No psychiatric disorder/disease has a demonstrated biological etiology. However, neither do a lot of bona fide medical diseases. More fundamentally, not a single psychiatric disorder/disease has a demonstrable physical or a chemical abnormality making of it a disease or anything "biologically-based", or "neuro-biologic."

Dr. Theodore Pearlman a psychiatrist in Houston, Texas, has it right. He says the DSM-IV has gone too far. 'There are too many diagnoses without any objective basis or biological support.' Try all of them. Talk Back rightfully observes, "Many psychiatrists are becoming disillusioned, and the DSM-IV is putting the practice of psychiatry into discredit." The DSM-IV, after all, is the APA, the AACAP, all of academic psychiatry.

Still trying to double-talk his/their way out of what is a failed, fraudulent psychiatric/pharmaceutical marketplace strategy (to call all emotional pains and behaviors, biological; diseases) , Dr. Harold Pincus, vice chairperson of the DSM-IV task force, rebuts: "There has never been any criterion that psychiatric diagnoses require a demonstrated biological etiology." Saying this, Dr. Pincus is, at the same time, aware of the claims made throughout psychiatry--including throughout academic psychiatry and it's peer-reviewed literature--that all of the psychiatric disorders entered in the DSM-IV are claimed to be "biologically-based", "neuro-biological", and to be diseases. Further, he is aware of that such claims are the staple of the propaganda put out to the public, the teachers of the nation, the legislators and judiciary, so that one and all can be sure that "labels" are appended and "treatments" are enforced (as they are today for 6-7 million normal schoolchildren for the fictitious "disease" ADHD) even if laws must be passed mandating drugs and hospitalizations where citizens do not know what is best for themselves and their children.

Straddling the fence between medicine and commerce, science and perversion of science, Pincus observes, the problem with psychiatric diagnosis: "Many people these days say if you don't want to work, if you want to get disability, the best doctor to see is a psychiatrist." And this, I might add, is the problem today with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and with the tainting of all advocacy on behalf of persons with legitimate disabilities, with this pollution from psychiatry.

I am not as much concerned with the psychiatrists who are becoming disillusioned by DSM dictates from above, or about putting the practice of psychiatry into discredit, as I am about the tens of millions of the physically normal but emotionally troubled, struggling, men women and children in the US who are being victimized-labeled, drugged and forever damaged.

Your role in this deception and victimization is clear. Whether you are a physician, so unscientific, that you cannot read their contrived, "neurobiologic" literature and see the fraud, or whether you see it and choose to be an accomplice--you should resign.

Truly yours,

Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD
1303 Hidden Mountain Drive
El Cajon, CA 92019

Other Original Essays by this very knowledgeable and courageous Doctor:

ADHD CONSENSUS CONFERENCE WHAT THEY DIDN’T TELL THE COUNTRY (ADHD AS FRAUD)

-Baughman response to Barkley (Scientific American, September, 1998
-To Governor Pete Wilson on Parity for Mental Health (September, 1998)
-Ritalin for Infants and Toddlers on Medicaid (August, 1998
-Damages, Legal (August, 1998)
-Letter to Senator Bill Frist (August, 1998)
-To Sheila Anderson, President, CHADD (August, 1998)
-Public School = "At Risk" (October, 1997)
-Kip Kinkel’s Psychiatric "Diseases": What Role Did They Play? (June, 1998)
-To Sheila Anderson, President, CHADD (June, 1998)
-Baughman response to Report of AMA, Council on Scientific Affairs (April, 1998)
-Baughman response to Lancet (February, 1998)
-Correspondence: Peter S. Jensen, NIMH (September 14, 1998)
-The Fraud of Dyslexia (August 1997)
-Letter to Peter S. Jensen, MD, NIMH (December 1, 1997)
-Smoking is a Choice, not an Illness (November, 1997)
-Letter to Tennessee State Representative Tommie F Brown (November, 1997)
-"De-Fanging" the Food and Drug Administration (November, 1997)
-Psychiatric Fraud: Pronouncing "Disorders"-"Diseases" (October, 1997)
-ADHD: On The Role Of The Peer-Reviewed Medical Literature
-Crime Of The Century
-Dyslexia Propaganda
-Hamilton County (Tennessee) Ritalin Consumption High
-Letter From Dr. Castellanos
---Re: Letter From Dr. Castellanos
-NIH, AD/HD Consensus Conference—Inappropriate, Unnecessary
-The Fraud Of ADHD—Psychiatric History Repeating Itself
-The Totality Of The ADD/ADHD Fraud
-Crime Of The Century
-Crime Of The Century
-Crime Of The Century
-Crime Of The Century
-Crime Of The Century
-Crime Of The Century
-Crime Of The Century
-Crime Of The Century
-Crime Of The Century
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You can visit his home page at:
http://home.att.net/~fred-alden/