Homeschoolers love to remind us that as children Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Albert Schweitzer, Pearl Buck, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Agatha Christie accomplished very little of their learning in the classroom. And it was Mahatma Gandhi's admitted ineptitude as a law student and later as a courtroom attorney' that forced him to practice law among outcast Indian immigrants in South Africa, thus starting him on the road to one of the most astounding social and political victories in human history. He makes for a very effective whistle blower because, as a clinical psychologist who could be making a handsome living writing prescriptions for Ritalin, et al, he emphatically repudiates any and every psychopharmaceutical approach to the behavioral management of children. Instead, the author spends the first part of this groundbreaking book questioning the validity of ADD as a medical disorder. Failure to adjust is the result of mental illness.
Mental illness is a medical disease.
Mental illness is incurable. Symptoms can be managed primarily by drugs Breeding's analysis is confirmed by the words of Dr. Robert Coles, who warns in a new preface to The Mind's Fate that twenty-first century psychology and psychiatry is going to be entirely based on chemical solutions to psychic distress. Coles, an eminent professor and researcher at Harvard University and author of the now classic Children in Crisis, says that we are already witnessing the arrival of a new generation of clinical psychologists and psychotherapists who no longer undergo their own analyses, a fundamental training requirement ever since Sigmund Freud and others invented this new science of the psyche. Conformity becomes an almost mathematical certainty and our growth-addicted economic system is all but insured the delivery of future generations of compliant consumers and producers. Today the makers of Ritalin and Prozac are reaping untold billions in profits and market analysts tell us this is only the beginning.