Repercussions from the Sandy Hook tragedy slight in Florida

It looks like Florida may not suffer as extensively from the fallout over the Newtown Connecticut massacre as some other states. The Palm Beach Post headline,  State May Shrink Mental Health Spending, doesn’t tell the whole story.

Despite a growth in the state’s anticipated revenue for the first time in six years, Gov. Rick Scott’s proposed 2013-2014 budget does not include any increase for mental health services. Neither Scott nor GOP legislative leaders mentioned the issue as a priority on the opening day of the legislative session Tuesday. And lawmakers appear split on the only two proposals in play — mandatory mental health screening of elementary school students and extending the observation period for patients who are involuntarily committed by law enforcement or health officials.

The problem concerns these two pieces of legislation that I hope our legislators will have the common sense and decency to table or vote down. Busting school children for “mental illness” is what mandatory mental health screening is all about and, frankly, if there’s one thing we don’t need, that is it. Labeling children “mentally ill”, and putting them on powerful pharmaceuticals, is not good for their educations, nor is it good for their futures. Extending the Baker Act would be a completely absurd, unnecessary, and as far as humanity goes, a wasteful thing to do.

Thankfully, given our republican controlled legislature, as bad as things are, these representatives are not in hurry to make them worse. Praised be the tightwad when the spending he isn’t spending on is repressive and draconian legislation.

The issue with spending is that it could, if it were used for something else besides busting people for “mental illness”, reduce mental health spending in the state anyway.

More than half of Florida’s mental health spending goes to hospitalization. Other states, on average, spend less than 30 percent on hospitalization, said Florida Council for Community Mental Health President Bob Sharpe.

Hospitalization is very costly. Keeping people out of the state hospital system through building a statewide community mental health care system is one way to potentially save a lot of money.

As for the Baker Act…

DCF estimates that 35,000 out of 110,770 people held under the Baker Act last year had been Baker Acted before. Sharpe points to at least one man who was Baker Acted 100 times in a single year, meaning he was hospitalized nearly the entire year.

It would seem that one person would have a pretty good case for suing the state, if he had any legal rights to stand on at all, which apparently, as a mental patient, he doesn’t.  On the other hand, when the state can Baker Act one person 100 times in the course of a single year, there is certainly no reason to extend the Baker Act. It seems institutions here have that power already.

Mental Health Policing On Miami Teacher Curricula

Did I say teacher curricula? Actually school workers across the board are being trained to walk the mental health cop beat. As the Miami Herald reports, in a story bearing the heading, Miami teachers get mental illness training…(Really? They train people in that, do they?)

Teachers, cafeteria workers and janitors in Miami-Dade County middle schools and high schools will receive training on how to identify early-warning signs of mental illness.

All you Miami area students out there remember ‘the straight and narrow’ because if you ever forget you’re likely to wind up somewhere near a mental health counseling center, if not in Dante’s Inferno.

The Herald reports the training will be administered by mental health professionals to about 100 school district psychologists and counselors. They, in turn, will train other employees. Possible signs of mental illness can include sleeping through class, bizarre writings and extreme risk-taking.

Students are advised to be wary and take necessary precautions. Take uppers (so called performance enhancing drugs) if you have to do so to get through boring classes. Hire a non-creative writing tutor if you think it will help you get to graduation. Scratch the idea of launching your own Jackass type film production as a video class project.

Beyond this you need to do a little research, and it wouldn’t hurt to get an outline of the teacher police work curricula to better escape detection and diagnosis. A little knowledge would allow you to move more easily under the radar so to speak. Students, that is to say, given teachers with “mental illness” training, need to hone their own mental health skills. If you’ve any question about what mental health skills entail, read a book on any “mental illness” label there is, and exclude from your daily behavioral repertoire those behaviors listed as “symptoms”.

Flamboyance, eccentricity, and non-conformity are to be suppressed until after graduation if possible. Free and critical thinking as well. The idea is to study the idea of dull until you have it down by heart. Breathe dull, think dull, act dull. Got it! Study dull. Dull will win you awards. Dull is the way to go. Dull is blood brother to “normal”. Dull will get you a job with a multinational corporation. Successful people work for high paying multinational corporations.

The Government’s Response To The Sandy Hook Tragedy

The good news is that President Obama wants some form of gun control when it comes to automatic weapons and ammo. If we limit the number of massively killing machines that there are out there, we limit the number of chances that you will get the kind of body counts you got at V-Tech and Sandy Hook. Body counts, in fact, almost rivaling the Oklahoma City bombing. Unfortunately, gun control measures are not likely to get very far in today’s atmosphere. You’ve got the gun lobby and a Republican controlled congress to contend with. Talk about gun control always triggers a gun buying frenzy among certain segments of the public as well. The gun control measures are perhaps the least likely items on the agenda to get passed.This leads us to the rest of the counteracting measures, and that’s the bad news.

First there is this matter of closing the loopholes in the federal background check database. The problem here is that people labeled “mentally ill” are actually less likely to commit violent crimes than the general population. This group has become the scapegoat for the acts of violence committed by a very few failed and frustrated individuals. None of the people who committed the multiple shootings we have seen in the recent past would have been caught by such a database even if the so called loopholes were closed. This database targets not only people who have known the inside of a mental institution, but also foreigners in this country illegally, spouse abusers, and ex-felons. This database will be used by law enforcement for harassing the people who are in it. The database itself constitutes a loophole in the bill of rights of the US constitution as none of the people in the database are to be accorded the rights that full citizenship would ordinarily accord a person. As such, it represents a loophole in constitutional protections of citizenship. This certainly creates quite a challenge for the people unfortunate enough to find themselves listed. They’ve got the fight for the civil rights that have been taken away from them, ahead of them.

Additionally, there is the matter of mental health insurance parody. Parity is too good a word. This parody involves insurance companies treating psychosomatic conditions as if they were physical conditions. The key words here are “as if”. We’re expected to allow insurance companies to take up the slack for a broken mental health system. Really. If the mental health system were recovering contributing members of society this wouldn’t be a problem, but that’s not the case. People receiving “mental illness” labels are expected to languish for the duration of their lives in some form of convalescence for which someone else picks up the tab. Insurance parity, on top of job discrimination, equals economic damage. Malingering should not be turned into the kind of a career that insurance parody of this sort can turn it into. This is economic damage. It is economic damage to the individual and it is economic damage to the nation as a whole. It is keeping people weak and dependent who should be strong and independent.

Finally officials want to beef up mental health policing and surveillance in the school systems. They would have more money pumped into counseling and screening children and adolescents in the hopes that they could catch problem kids before they left school and shot bunches of people. The problem is that such an effort is likely to have a result opposite the one intended. Early intervention is not prevention; it actually amounts to causation. Putting money into mental health in the schools is invariably going to increase the numbers of school children labeled “mentally ill”. These numbers have increased dramatically recently in no small measure due to the focus that mental health has received in the mass media. Children that enter mental health treatment don’t always leave mental health treatment alive. There is a statistic that indicates the failure of the mental health system that I alluded to earlier. If 1/2 of the people labeled lifelong mental patients are labeled by the age of 14 years old, as it is indeed said they are, do we really want to label more children? Increasing the numbers of children labeled “seriously mentally ill” is going to increase the numbers of adults labeled “seriously mentally ill”. Children grow up, but they don’t always grow up healthy. A healthy mental health system is a system that is contracting. An unhealthy mental health system is a system that is expanding. We’ve got better things to do than to sell “mental illness” under the pretext of selling mental health.

The government has better ways to serve the people of this country than by beefing up it’s mental health security force the way it wants to do in the schools. This patrolling the hallways of our nation’s schools for errant behavior is going to result in more students penalized, and in many cases, pathologized, for annoying behavior. Children, as a rule, grow up. As they are children, we have to expect them to engage in a certain amount of foolish and silly behavior. We have to expect them to make mistakes. We also have to expect them to be able to learn from mistakes to correct mistakes. Lowering the expectation for some of them that they will ever attain the wisdom that comes with age is not an improvement. Damaging the futures of children in the name of mental health, although the course we are set on, is not the kind of thing we should be doing with our nation’s children.

Just Wait Until “Adult ADHD” Rates Catch Up

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) rates are going up. Hardly a shocking finding. If you invent a disease, disease rates are likely to go up rather than down without an effective way to expose you, and with you, it. As reported in Psychiatric Annals, Rate of ADHD diagnosis increased in past decade, researchers looking at trends among 842,830 schoolchildren aged 5 to 11 found the following.

According to the researchers, rates of ADHD diagnosis were 2.5% in 2001 vs. 3.1% in 2010, a relative increase of 24%. During the same period, the rate of ADHD diagnosis increased among whites (4.7% to 5.6%; RR=1.3; 95% CI, 1.2-1.4), blacks (2.6% to 4.1%; RR=1.7; 95% CI, 1.5-1.9) and Hispanics (1.7% to 2.5%; RR=1.6; 95% CI, 1.5-1.7). Rates of diagnosis among Asian/Pacific Islander and other racial groups remained unchanged.

We’re more hyperactive then in 2010 than we were in 2001, that is to say, that boys will be boys, and not only will boys be boys, but girls will be girls. Confused? You’re not alone. Or to be more on target, children will be children.

The rate increase among blacks was largely due to a growing number of girls with an ADHD diagnosis (RR=1.9; 95% CI, 1.5-2.3). Boys were more likely than girls to be diagnosed with ADHD, but study results indicated that the sex gap may be closing among blacks. The researchers also observed a much higher rate of ADHD diagnosis among children living in high-income ($70,000 per year or more) households (P<.001).

Just imagine, sex equality in pathology. Things must be improving for folks of color out there, wouldn’t you say? Or, maybe not. The good news is the arrival of the spoiled brat syndrome so you folks out there in the ghetto don’t have to feel like you’re alone in your misery. Or, maybe not. Mommy and daddy uptown can buy success for junior, can’t they? …Oh, well…Them’s the breaks.

“Although the reasons for increasing ADHD rates are not well understood, contributing factors may include heightened ADHD awareness among parents and physicians, increased use of screening and other preventive services, and variability in surveillance methods among institutions,” the researchers wrote.

Okay dokey. If awareness induces contagion, no wonder they say ‘ignorance is bliss’. Screening for figurative disease is going to increase the incidence of figurative disease. Undoubtedly. Calling screening and miseducation preventive is the real kicker though. Rates go up, and you’re preventing. Oh, yeah? Uh huh. Alluding to surveillance is more to the point. This isn’t about letting children be children, this is about training the next generation of corporate bureaucrats, and maybe, just maybe, we’ve got better things to be doing in the first place.

One factor  not listed, although the authors did mention not having any published ties to pharmaceutical companies, is the influence of drug markets on this increase. I can’t imagine it doesn’t have anything to do with stimulant, and the miscalled ‘performance enhancing’, drug sales, does it? Check out stock exchange figures sometime. I reckon, if anything, ADHD treatment drug makers aren’t suffering. The wall street party goes on and on, even if from here on out at a tightly guarded secret location.

A Little Bit of Discretion, Please

Bad advice remains bad advice. Bad parents are gullible parents. Skepticism, given the amount of nonsense floating about in the world today, is a virtue.

Are you dealing with Turbulent teens or mental illness? this article in the The Gleaner from Jamaica would deceptively appear to ask. The article is actually selling “mental illness”. It suggests that any reader’s child could be “sick”. First thought. Read on, and damn your kid to a diminished life as a social and human failure in the mental sickness system if you want to do so, or think better of the matter, and go, “Wait a minute, maybe pegging my kid with a psychiatric label isn’t the best way to proceed at all”.

The article answers the question, “What should parents do?” with the following 7 alarmist answers that were probably dreamed up by a pharmaceutical company advertising team.

1. Be vigilant. 2. Seek professional help. 3. Do not be afraid to seek psychiatric care. 4. Do not shove it under the carpet. 5. There is danger in delay.

My response to this orange alert approach to problems in living is to reply, “Bullshit!” He or she who seeks to find “sickness” in a child will find it, and he or she who seeks to find “wellness” in a child will find that. This approach would hunt for “illness” rather than for “health”. To paraphrase gospel, “Let he or she who is without error attach the first label”.

The article supplies its own “mental illness” screening test of sorts. It gives 8 warning signs of “mental illness”. Now you’ve got a “mental illness” checklist if you are really desperate to have a child labeled, disposed of in the loony bin, locked away and abandoned. The message is clear. You, too, given this checklist, can bear a brood of loony birds.

1. Change in behavior. 2. Decline in school performance. 3. Drug use. 4. Poor self-care. 5. [Change in pattern of] Social interaction. 6. Communication is reduced. 7. Family breakdown. 8. Strange behavior.

I’ve got news for you. Each of the items on this checklist is a “symptom” of being a teenager. Adolescent rebellion is not a disease. Mom, Dad, get over it! Junior has to grow up. Mental health treatment or no mental health treatment, you shouldn’t try to hang onto your kid forever. Your child is merely testing his or her wings. Some parents will suffocate their kid rather than accept the simple truth that the kid needs more independence.

I could draw up a checklist for kids to use in diagnosing parents, too, but this is all about power, and we don’t give kids that kind of power until they are deemed old enough to use it. Unfortunately, some grown up kids never get old enough to use it wisely.

Mad About The Middle Ages

I have suggested at one time or another that acting classes, a course in logic, or survivalist training might be good for a person’s mental health. A flyer about a demonstration I played a part in recently suggested protest was therapeutic. Here’s another idea…Maybe archeology could help return a person to his or her wits.

A medieval village in Herfordshire England is slowly resurfacing. The story appears in the BBC News Hereford & Westchester, under the headline, Remains of ‘medieval village’ found in Herefordshire.

Excavation work began a week ago on land in the Brockhampton Estate, near Bromyard and experts say it gives a glimpse of rural 13th Century life.

Seems there was once a village called Studmarsh in a place known as Grove.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

The project is being undertaken by volunteers, including people recovering from mental health problems.

Anybody up for doing a little digging after days of yore.

Some Heritage Lottery funded the Past in Mind dig after hearing how rural history had inspired volunteers from a mental health charity.

The project is run by the mental health charity, Herefordshire Mind.

Really? You mean hopefully ex-loony bird ne’er do wells are good for something besides holding a mop? Jumping Jehosaphat, Batman! What a revelation!

Free ADHD testing goes the way of free lunches at UF

If you thought “stigma” was the only obstacle to seeking mental health treatment, think again, there is also the little matter of costs. The University of Florida, which previously had given free ADHD tests, will soon start charging. Diagnosis is going to cost students money starting this fall.

The story is in the latest edition of the Independent Florida Alligator, under the heading, UF will charge students in Fall for currently free ADHD testing.

The new four-step process will take seven hours and will cost $175 per student.

That’s right! It may now cost you $175 to acquire an ADHD. Consider, too, that this is only the price for purchasing the disorder. Feeding, maintenance, and vet costs follow close behind. An ADHD, with the advent of ADHDs for adults, can last well beyond the lifetime of a single individual.

These tests, despite being more elaborate than previous tests, are designed to determine the aptitude and dedication an individual might display in caring for an ADHD.

First students must be screened because you wouldn’t want a student with an ADHD that couldn’t properly care for that ADHD.

Students will go through two 90-minute screening sessions, one of which costs $25.

As you can see ADHD is a very peculiar animal.

The third step is a three-hour, $150 evaluation including an IQ test, a personality test, an achievement test and a specific test for ADHD.

Reportedly this deal at UF is a very good one as an alive and kicking ADHD can run you as much as 2Gs from a private collector.

ADHDs have gained increasing popularity over the years, especially among school age boys. It is estimated that almost 10 % of the male children in this country are the proud owners of ADHDs.

Those students without the necessary funding to purchase an ADHD may be able to get around this shortcoming by applying for financial aid.

Ignore History At Thy Peril

How do you dialogue with psychiatry when psychiatry doesn’t dialogue with you? You don’t. This leaves psychiatrists rehashing things the psychiatric survivor, mental patients’ liberation, movement dealt with many years ago…as if we had not done so. We, in this case, means people who have endured or survived psychiatric treatment, or perhaps mistreatment is the more apt way of putting it.

This psychiatrist, H. Steve Moffic, M.D., makes an effort to come up with a name for discrimination against people who have had psychiatric labels attached to them. The story in Psychiatric Times bears the heading, Psychism: Defining Discrimination of Psychiatry.

I don’t think by today that there can be any question that there is significant discrimination and prejudice directed against those who are deemed to have some sort of significant mental problem. Many times, that has resulted in trying to keep such people out of mainstream society, whether that be hospitalization, not being able to live in certain neighborhoods, and not being hired for work.

Brilliant deduction, Sherlock! We ex-patients have been saying the same thing for years and years on top of years. When did you first reach this astounding conclusion, sir?

From here he adopts the personal pronoun “we”. An editorial we would presume to speak for everybody. As for this “we”, the “we” he would be speaking for is the “we” of people he treats, we, using the editorial we, will call this “we” the benevolent dictatorial “we” instead. Tonto adds, “He speak like him ownum turf, Ke-mo sah-bee.”

Now we may be seeing more and more of that in our field as the antipsychiatry movement of Scientologists seems to be expanding to former patients and their families who felt they were hurt by psychiatry. While some anger and criticism is surely warranted, the vitriol and call for the end of psychiatrists seems to border on hate speech, as described in the recent Psychiatric Times blog of Ronald Pies, MD.

Families that have lost loved ones to psychiatry might feel they have reasons for identifying with the Church of Scientology. Likewise they might feel they have reasons for not identifying with the Church of Biological Psychiatry. This is not an issue for me. The Church of Scientology is no more open and transparent than is the Church of Biological Psychiatry.

Mental health consumers and psychiatric survivors marched on the APA convention in Philadelphia this May. We had to be adamant. We had some psychiatrist come outside who thought we had something to do with Scientology. We didn’t have anything to do with Scientology, and we didn’t want anybody to think we did. Cult, church, or organization–legimate or illegimate–we were in no way connected with Scientology, nor it’s front group, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. Apparently these guys only read themselves.

Blacks have racism, woman have sexism, Jews have anti-semitism, etc. Why not come up with an “ism” for people who have done time in the mental health system?

Perhaps the lack of such an “ism” indicates a discrimination and prejudice even more intense or ingrained, so much so that there is not even a term to rally around. Such a term could be psychism. This is a term that is so unused that we can easily adopt it as our own. In theosophy, I found it used on rare occasions to refer to spiritual awakening. Spiritual awakening is indeed what we need, isn’t it?

Where has this man been for the last few decades? Language has long been a major concern for people in the psychiatric survivor, mental health consumer, and ex-patient Mad Pride movement. We’ve even started to sit down with the likes of him. People in this movement have come up with the terms mentalism and sanism to describe prejudice and discrimination directed against them for this very reason. These terms are part and parcel of that discrimination of psychiatry we term psychiatric oppression.

We don’t need a psychiatrist to link our struggle to the struggles of African Americans, women, gays, senior citizens, children, disabled people, homeless people and other often disenfranchised and marginalized peoples. We’ve been a part of those same struggles for many years. If this man took any real interest in the history of the people he treated as a group, he would know these things. Apparently it’s a history lesson he desparately needs.

Former Dysfunctionaries Pursue Career Change In NYC

I notice words. I notice the arrangements they are laid out in. I have questions about those arrangements when I find the logic of whatever statement is being made faulty. Mental health issues treatment represents a black hole for the dispensing with any hint of logic in any statement made. I think we are still in the dark ages when it comes to the treatment of human distress chiefly because of the medical model approach to problems. Problems demand solutions, and a pharmaceutical is not the solution to any problem.

Huffington Post is carrying this article, authored by one Michael Friedman, with the heading, Art Helps People Live With Mental Illness. My most visceral response to this headline is to query why anybody would want to live with “mental illness”. An alternate heading, for instance, might run, Art Helps People Live Without Mental Illness. Apparently either art hasn’t progressed so far, and “mental illness” is still too clinging, for us to make any such statement right off the bat.

I am visiting the HAI Art Studio. All of the artists have mental illness, and the studio is funded as a mental health program designed to facilitate rehabilitation. But I would never have known that without being told.

Ask, live, and learn.

Everyone at the studio is working from his or her own artistic vision. Francis Palazzolo — the creative director of the program and a working artist — says that the individuality of the artistic experience is at the heart of the studio’s philosophy. “We do not have a single standard.” Sometimes Mr. Palazzolo offers suggestions to help the artists realize their personal vision or to experiment doing something different and challenging for them, but the goal is for each artist to be engaged in the effort to create images that speak to them personally.

What is the function of art? I imagine a person could waste reams of paper on that subject, and at the end of it all we’d be right back where we started, clueless. What is the function of a human being? It isn’t really important that we remember that a person labeled “mentally ill” is a person who dysfunctions. Leave it to psychiatrists. The function of a human being would lead to an equally annane and misdirected waste of paper if pursued to it’s most illogical conclusion.

When school is therapy, and art is school, I would hope there is a point at which students graduate, and patients recover.

I’m back on the subject of identity questions I’d like to pose to our student/patients, such as, are you a “mentally ill” person with an art hobby, or are you an artist who happens to be “mentally ill”? Career “mental illness” you will find, in this sense, can interfere with the creation of art. Likewise, I think that art might have a tendency to interfere with a “mental illness” career in optimal circumstances. We would hope maybe the “mental illness” identity could shrink to microscopic dimensions of insignificance, and the artistic identity might grow into more monumental proportions.

This is not to say that these residents and visitors to Soho have any less right to be there than any other inhabitant of that ville. I think such programs a good thing, and there is always the possibility that a formerly full-time mental patient might make a successful transition into the field of arts and crafts. Hopefully these “mental illness” labels don’t have to stick beyond any token advantaging use to which they may be put.

“We need more programs like this,” Mr. Johnson tells me. “We need people to advocate for more funding so that more and more people with mental illness can have art in their lives and a reason to get out of bed in the morning.”

We need more programs that offer a full time mental patient the prospect of making a successful career change. I would hope that a program such as this one could potentially become one of those programs. We have more than enough adult kiddie art therapy kindergarten-type mess areas. Let’s hope this program can aspire to be a little better, and more fulfilling, than the obscure permanent misplacement that that kind of cul de sac must all too often represent.

The ADHD Party Line

Some people have a hard time detecting crap. What kind of a dumb ass reading this “mental illness” drug company propaganda can take any of it seriously? Apparently there are a great many people who do get sucked into this lip sync mode. One distant and foreign brain to determine everything you do, think, or say can be pretty disturbing to people trained in independent thought, and thinking for oneself.

According to this blog post at PsychCentral, Breaking the Silence of ADHD Stigma, a “stigma” is attached to the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder label. This post starts out by stating that speaking up about this purported “stigma” attached to the ADHD label will help to alleviate it; the “stigma”, that is, not the postulated “disease”. I imagine they are expecting all the speakers to be saying the same thing. It goes onto explain about this “stigma”…

It’s also decreasing thanks to well-designed studies, said Stephanie Sarkis, Ph.D, a psychotherapist and author of several books on ADHD, including Adult ADD: A Guide for the Newly Diagnosed. “Research is showing more and more that ADHD is a true biological [and] genetic disorder,” she said.

Well, perhaps what we need are more well-designed studies showing that pigs can fly, or that up is down. The truth of the matter is that researchers are now talking epigenetic rather than merely of genetics. Epigenetic deals with the interaction of environment and genes. Hmmm, so EVERYTHING isn’t so biological after all.

According to the post, ADHD is neither a personality trait nor a weakness in character. ADHD is not a result of poor parenting. The authors seem to claim that to suggest that the ADHD “sufferer” has any sort of self-control whatsoever is to be “stigmatizing”.

If you want to see confusion at work, contrast their ADHD is not an excuse for drug taking ploy with the definition of disease mongering.

Adults with ADHD are misperceived as “drug-seeking,” seeking the diagnosis in order to supposedly get their hands on stimulants. As [psychotherapist Terry] Matlen corrected, many adults with ADHD actually forget to take their medication.

People labeled with ADHD aren’t, according to these professionals, lazy or less than ambitious, no, they have defective brains, and to suggest anything else is to attach a “stigma” to them.

We’re not talking about college students cramming for exams. We’re talking about children who behave in ways that disturb their elders, mostly parents and teachers.

Main Entry: disease-mongering
Part of Speech: n
Definition: efforts by a pharmaceutical company to create or exaggerate a malady for the purpose of increasing sales of a medication

This is your mental health professional. This is your mental health professional with a bottle of pills. This is the drug company that is pulling the strings on your mental health professional.

When these over zealous mental health professionals stop seeing the ADHD label, and start seeing the flesh and blood human being, maybe we will be beginning to see some progress. You can’t get much more prejudiced than some of these people are who see “stigma” everywhere they turn. I don’t think an inalterable brain defect is an improvement over a changeable situation. I feel the idea is used to sell drugs.

I think I can recognise the idealogy of idealogues when I see it, and these proponents of the ADHD label are idealogues in the same sense that members of the party in one party totalitarian regimes are idealogues. These people think talking about the issue a good thing so long as they are the only ones doing the talking. As soon as somebody comes along with something different to say, its time to call in the head of your censorship office. You know the excuse that is going to being given for censorship already, don’t you? What you have to say is “stigmatizing”, and therefore, you have to be silenced.