"To call normal children diseased, abnormal, chemically imbalanced. To make patients out of them for profit. This is not only anti-scientific, it is contrary to our Hippocratic oath. It is immoral, and it should be exposed and stopped."
Dr. Fred A. Baughman, MD
Neurologist and Author
As quoted from the movie, "Generation RX"
Generation RX is a movie which explores the connections between the pharmaceutical industry and medicine. How the pharmaceutical industry affects the formations of diagnoses and the treatments of psychiatric disorders. This relationship is causing normal human behavior to be medicalized and classified as "abnormal". It is causing a massive increase in the prescription of psychotropic medications for children at increasingly younger ages. Some quotes from the movie:
"Mind and mood altering drugs are the fastest growing class of drugs in the world." Generation RX
"It's quite ironic actually because the only imbalances that we know of in the brains of people who are called mental patients are the ones inflicted on them by the psychiatric drugs. How ironic. We make a false claim that they have biochemical imbalances then we give them biochemical imbalances."
Peter R. Breggin, MD
Psychiatrist and Author
"In prescribing powerful psychostimulants and then selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors to children, these drugs were never designed to be used in children in the first instance. The ethical dilemma is extending their use to children with no scientific support whatsoever."
Barry Turner
Medical Law and Ethics, Lincoln University
"As a journalist I was a believer in this story. I wrote stories about how psychiatric disorders are caused by chemical imbalances. I can remember writing a story about this Depression Screening Day. Isn't that a good thing? Go get screened. So, I was a believer in a story of psychiatry as a story of progress. We were learning about the brain, we were learning about the biological underpinnings of the these disorders and we had drugs that fixed that biolgical problem. That's what I believed as a science writer. So, I was stunned. That when you actually go the research, it's not there. That the whole story starts falling apart. This whole public story of advance in understanding in the biology of psychiatric disorders - it falls apart so quickly. And what you find in fact is that the drugs cause chemical imbalances because they perturb normal systems. They block normal function of say, dopamine and serotonin and the brain actually tries to compensate for this. It was exactly the reverse of what I had written about and been told."
"So, I hate to say this, I was a believer. And you can't believe when you dig into this research literature, and if you're a believe in science like I am, you can't believe the fraud that has been perpetrated on the American public. And it has been a fraud."
Robert Whitaker
Pulitzer Prize Nominated Journalist, Science Writer
"Kids I know all over my community could easily, if they were in a particular school with a particular teacher be labeled as "hyperactive". I don't put a lot of credibility in the definition of hyperactivity. I know that some people would criticize me for this because they think it's all good science. It's really not. It's part of the commercial reality."
Stephen Post Ph.D
Case Western School of Medicine
"Generation RX" is available through streaming video on Netflix. You can also purchase the video on Amazon.com.