Breggin targets this recent tendency on the part of educators, psychiatrists, and policy makers to view children s behaviors as dysfunctions when they depart from the norm and then to advocate medical treatments for those supposed dysfunctions. Biological psychiatry poses threats to children for a number of reasons, all detailed effectively in the first two chapters of Reclaiming Our Children . If parents are convinced that the source of a child s problems is brain chemistry gone wrong, then they will also become convinced that there is nothing that they can do to change the child s circumstances beyond taking him to a doctor to be medicated. As Breggin observes, biological psychiatry disempowers not only parents but also the child himself. Breggin further explains that rampant diagnosis and drugging of some children is likely to have a bad effect on other youngsters.
Children soon learn that they had better be quiet, well behaved, submissive, and dutiful.
In a chilling scene, Breggin describes the role of biopsychiatry in last year s White House Conference on Mental Health. Tipper Gore, who chaired the conference, set the tone for the proceedings by announcing during the president s weekly radio address that mental disorders are biological in nature and can be effectively treated with new drugs. This would be accomplished, according to Bill Clinton, through a new national school safety training program for teachers, schools, and communities to help identify troubled children and provide them with better school mental health services. As Breggin sees it, the conference was pushing an agenda to encourage more American kids to take psychiatric drugs. The medicalization of children s behavior may be lethal in ways that Breggin does not mention.