FINDING THE

UNDERLYING PROBLEM

THERE IS a world of difference between the art of identifying symptoms and the science of finding and treating causes. Psychiatrists specialize in cataloguing symptoms and then try to convince people that the symptoms are causes and that their treatments work, merely because the symptoms appear to have dissipated or changed.

But these are not causes, they are just symptoms and their treatments have brought about a worsening of the person’s condition. Blind to real causes, they remain blind to the consequences of their actions. And herein lies the most important truth concerning the plague of social problems characterizing our youth and general society today—psychiatrists defining every child or adolescent problem in life as a “mental disorder,” to be controlled by mind-altering drugs. When parents, misled by psychiatric opinion, tell a child he or she has a “mental disorder,” it forwards a dangerous lie: “These children believe they have something wrong with their brains that makes it impossible for them to control themselves without using a pill,” said Dr. Fred Baughman, Jr., a California pediatric neurologist.55

Further, Dr. Sydney Walker said that psychiatric drugs “often create new and serious symptoms patients didn’t have before ‘treatment.’ Drugs are alien substances that upset the natural chemical environment of neurons (the brain cells…), causing these cells to compensate by altering their sensitivity or their own output of chemicals….The more out of whack the brain’s chemicals get, the more symptoms occur….”56

Any medical doctor who takes the time to conduct a thorough physical examination of a child or adult exhibiting signs of what psychiatrists say are “mental disorders,” can find undiagnosed, untreated physical conditions. For example, decades ago, the term “mad as a hatter” stemmed from workers using mercury to prepare felt hats. The fumes and the quantity accidentally ingested produced an organic deterioration resulting eventually in dementia. Thus a sizeable number of hatters became “mad” as a result of chronic mercury pollution.57

• Medical doctors have established that mercury poisoning, environmental toxins and allergies can affect behavior and academic performance and can create symptoms, which have been labeled as childhood behavioral and attention “disorders.”58 This is not a case of “mimicking” a “mood disorder,” it means that an untreated physical condition exists—and that is all it is.
• Gases, cleaning fluids, scents and other chemicals can make a child “irritable, inattentive, spacey, aggressive, depressed or hyperactive.”59
• Physical conditions such as thyroid v malfunction can produce symptoms of various “mental disorders,” including bipolar. It is well known that abnormal thyroid conditions can dramatically effect mood and cause severe depression, fatigue and memory loss.60 Even in its 2001 fact sheet on bipolar, the National Institute of Mental Health acknowledged that people labeled with bipolar “often have abnormal thyroid gland function” and “because too much or too little thyroid hormone alone can lead to mood and energy changes, it is important that thyroid levels are carefully monitored by a physician.”61
• Dr. Sydney Walker said that thousands of children put on psychiatric drugs are simply “smart.” “They’re hyper, not because their brains don’t work right, but because they spend most of the day waiting for slower students to catch up with them. These students are bored to tears, and people who are bored fidget, wiggle, scratch, stretch, and (especially if they are boys) start looking for ways to get into trouble.”62
• The California Department of Mental Health Medical Evaluation Field Manual states: “Mental health professionals working within a mental health system have a professional and a legal obligation to recognize the presence of physical disease in their patients.…[P]hysical diseases may cause a patient’s mental disorder [or] may worsen a mental disorder….”63

Therefore, it is very important that a competent medical—not psychiatric— doctor thoroughly physically examine any child exhibiting any form of behavioral problem to find the underlying physical condition.