David A. Hancock
Chester
Republicans Prove Point!
Stimulating Reproach
After a couple of months of travel-leisure and recreational therapy (retirement is nirvana) as well as a respite and sabbatical from letter writing, it’s time to get back to business.
After some catatonic and didactic musings, I need to respond to Thomas Keck’s June letter, “Haters of President.” I really did get a “Keck” (equivoque intended) out of his perspicacious perceptions. Let’s face it—we all talk and write about nouns such as people (small minds); places, things, and events (average minds); and ideas (great minds) in regard to Admiral Rickover’s quote “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”
He then says that he hopes that I do not go off the deep end like my fellow colleague and friend of Patriots for Change, Elliott Berenson. I’ll just leave this nonsensical nonsense at that.
Maybe most of us are educated beyond our intelligence. For enlightenment, read any of Howard Gardner’s books on intelligence, especially Five Minds for the Future.
However, Mr. Keck is on target with “Nepotism at Kenston.” I personally observed the “miscreants of the corporate oligarchy” (a.k.a. board of education) choose this behavior several times during my thirty-five-year tenure as a public school teacher.
Kenston School District proves the wit and wisdom of the literary legend Mark Twain when he said, “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
Enough said. Except for this, I’ve always enjoyed reproachfulness directed toward me since kindergarten. It stimulates my endorphins and neurotransmitters.
David A. Hancock
Chester
Medicate to Educate
The perceptive and accurate observations by Susanne M. Alexander—Letter to the Editor (PD 5-25-00)—“Why are There so Many Hyperactive Diagnoses?” in reference to overprescribing Ritalin and forcing children into structured, inflexible school environments and crowded day care centers is right on target about finding creative alternatives to medication.
There seems to be a positive correlation among drugs, behavior, and violence in public schools. All the recent instances of school violence has taken place in public schools—not private schools. I wonder why? Very simple: public schools reflect society—private schools reflect selection, segregation in general, and isolation from the real world as well as a very different school climate in terms of student behavior, motivation, attitudes, and academic achievement.
There is an immense difference in what is and what is not tolerated in a public school and what is and what is not tolerated in a private school.
The children who “needed Ritalin” (which disrupts growth hormone production, impairs mental function, and does not improve learning and achievement—just what adolescents need!) in order to control behavior and make them obedient, conforming, and quiet in the public school classroom usually do fine in private school. There is substantial evidence that many classes of psychiatric drugs can cause or exacerbate depression, suicide, paranoia, and violence. Ritalin and the amphetamines (stimulants) are very similar to cocaine in terms of how they affect brain chemistry and function. Eric Harris was taking Luvox (antidepressant prescribed for obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is in the same class as Prozac) at the time he committed ten murders at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on 4-20-99. It has been recommended that maintaining patience, tolerance, and guidance with children who underachieve is a far more positive action than medicating them.
According to Peter Breggin, psychiatrist, in his books Toxic Psychiatry and Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications, many psychiatric drugs often cause the very problems they are supposed to correct. All this talk about biochemical imbalance is pure guesswork. Research in no way bolsters the idea that psychiatric drugs correct imbalances. Psychiatric drugs are spreading an epidemic of permanent brain damage. Someone once asked, “What’s the difference between an adult and a child? The adult is on Prozac, and the child is on Ritalin.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Brain Drugs Hazardous
I would like to strongly encourage everyone to read Warning: Psychiatry Can Be Hazardous to Your Health by William Glasser, MD, a psychiatrist who has never prescribed a psychotropic drug.
Dr. Glasser, the father of reality therapy, maintains that when we are diagnosed with a mental illness or disorder, such as depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, and treated with brain drugs, we become one of the millions of geese who lay golden eggs for the multibillion-dollar brain-drug industry. There are big bucks in brain drugs.
“This industry, which masquerades as mental health’s best friend, generously funds a variety of groups and activities that promote mental illness and brain drugs. Examples of this funding are lucrative research grants to psychiatrists who can come up with supportive research, plus psychiatric conferences; liberal grants to mental-health associations that vigorously support mental illness and brain drugs; large grants to patient-advocacy groups that do the same; and millions of dollars to fund high-powered public-relations firms to promote the ‘new drugs’ to cure ‘mental illness’ and to persuade the media to report these cures.
“The last thing the psychiatric establishment and the drug companies want is for you to get the idea that you can improve your own mental health or help your loved ones to improve theirs at no cost to yourself.
“We are led to believe that if we have psychological problems, we are ill; all we need to get our mental health back is a pill. There is a further price we risk when we take strong brain drugs; many of them harm the brain and cause real mental illness.”
As Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness, says, “Giving oneself an addictive drug is a crime; receiving it from a government agent called an ‘addiction specialist’ is a treatment.
“If a person ingests a drug prohibited by legislators and claims that it makes him feel better, that proves that he is an addict. If he ingests a drug prescribed by psychiatrists and claims that it
