of New Hampshire, showed that, regardless of race, socio-economic status, the gender of the child and the quality of the support given to the child by the mother, the tendency to antisocial behaviour increases after corporal punishment. Straus also found links between corporal punishment in childhood and adult violence, masochistic sex, depression and alcohol abuse.15
A study which revealed how children who are physically abused lose their capacity for empathy took the form of a survey of 11,600 adults in the USA, and found that 74 per cent of those who had been punched, kicked or choked by their parents did not consider this type of behaviour abusive.16 In Britain at least one child dies every week from injuries inflicted by an adult, usually a parent or step-parent. Yet in Sweden, where all forms of corporal punishment have been illegal for twenty years, only four children have died at the hands of an adult over that time and, of these four, only one died at the hands of a parent. A study published in 1999 on the effects of the ban on smacking in Sweden showed that the number of reports of assaults on children increased, with the result that any child at risk of serious injury was identified early, thus preventing anything like the tragic cases found all too often in Britain where, even though healthcare workers and neighbours often knew that a child was being savagely beaten, no one acted to prevent the child’s brutal murder. In Britain young people’s drug use and alcohol intake have increased over the past twenty years, while in Sweden these have decreased.17
In Britain surveys show that many more people want to ban fox-hunting than want to ban parents smacking their children. It is often said that the British prefer animals to children, but harsh, uncaring attitudes to children are found in every society. Those who want to retain the right of parents to inflict physical punishments argue that a ban would turn the parents into criminals. The Swedish government introduced many measures concerned with improving the skills of the parents and with providing good professional support.
Physical punishment gives parents no cause to think about their actions. A slap can be inflicted instantly. Over recent years psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry have provided parents with another method of controlling their children which requires no thought on the part of the parents except to remember when to administer a pill.
Kirsty, a social worker, told me how she had gone to visit her younger brother Tim, his wife Cora and their three-year-old son Peter. Peter was being his usual rumbustious self, rushing around, climbing on chairs and tables, enjoying rough games with his father, noisily arguing with his aunt over a jigsaw. The only time he was quiet was when he sat, transfixed, in front of the television watching his favourite programme, Bob the Builder.
As Kirsty watched her strong, healthy, active nephew, she remembered Tim at that age, behaving just like Peter, and wearing their parents out with his antics. She remembered too how surprised she had been when her grandmother had talked about Kirsty’s father being the same at that age. Kirsty knew her father only as a very staid accountant, just like Tim had become. Over dinner, when Peter had finally gone to bed, Kirsty wanted to reminisce about the generations of boys in her family who had been such lively three-year-olds, but she was forestalled by Cora saying, ‘There’s something we want to ask you,’ and Tim enquiring, ‘Do you think Peter’s got ADHD?’
ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, is currently a fashionable syndrome. Physical illnesses do not have fashions, only epidemics when some virus or bacillus is on the loose, or when some deleterious environmental conditions prevail. Physical illnesses have some identifiable physical basis, but mental disorders do not. Some psychiatrists claim that a brain dysfunction underlies ADHD, but no such dysfunction has been found.
In the early 1960s, before ADHD was invented, I was working in Sydney, Australia, as an educational psychologist with special responsibility for children with emotional problems. Part of my work was to advise teachers about pupils whose behaviour was causing them concern. The kind of children who were most frequently referred to me were seven- or eight-year-old boys who would not or could not settle into the classroom routine. When I examined these boys and their family background I found that they fell into two groups.
The first and largest group was those boys whom school did not suit. Many such children have good performance abilities - that is, they have good hand-eye co-ordination, they can think in spatial terms, and can analyse and construct patterns but their verbal skills - either through inborn limitations or early education - have not developed to the same degree as their performance skills. However, schools use and value verbal skills much more than performance skills, and thus many boys come to feel alienated from the educational process. Consequently, if they are bored in class, they seek to entertain themselves, and if they feel rejected and undervalued they seek to protect and to assert themselves by getting attention through being naughty. If you cannot be famous you might as well be notorious.
To a casual observer this first group of boys was no different from the second group, who were also inattentive, restless and inclined to get into mischief. However, these boys were not bored and seeking attention. They were frightened, and their fear made them unable to concentrate and to keep still. The family background of these boys was one which created the child’s fears. Some of these families were deeply unhappy. The mother may have been depressed and threatening suicide, or the father may have been a brutal tyrant. Some were migrants and the parents were still suffering the effects of their experiences in the Second World War. Often the adults were unable to adapt to a strange country. One young lad told me how at home his grandmother would punish him if he spoke English, yet he now thought in English and wanted to be accepted as an ordinary Australian boy.
It was not a happy time for any of these boys, but in one way they were lucky. They could not be diagnosed as having ADHD and be medicated with Ritalin.18
Ritalin and Equasym are the brand names of two drugs based on the generic drug methylphenidate hydrochloride, used in the treatment of ADHD. Both have been approved by the UK National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), which advises that the drugs should not be given to children under six and should be used only as part of a comprehensive treatment programme. In the USA several million children have been prescribed these drugs, including large numbers of children under six, even toddlers. Ritalin is so well known in the USA that my word-processing program includes it in its dictionary. In the USA and Australia it is known as ‘kiddie cocaine’. A survey of child psychiatrists and paediatricians across Australia showed that 80 per cent have prescribed stimulant drugs like Ritalin for children. In 1999 this type of drug was prescribed for 5,819 children under six, of whom 67 were aged two and 715 aged three.19 In the UK the number of children prescribed these drugs is now in the thousands and is doubling each year. The literature supplied by the pharmaceutical companies which make the drugs speaks of ‘psycho-stimulant therapy’ but does not explain why children who are hyperactive are given a drug that is known for its capacity to stimulate adults.
Drugs that are prescribed for babies and children both in medicine and psychiatry are not tested on babies and children. Drugs are tested only on adults. All doctors can do is extrapolate from the recommended adult dose. Babies and children have died from some such extrapolations.20 Recently the National Institute of Mental Health in the USA set up the Research Units on Pediatric Pharmacology (RUPP). The first report issued by one of these was that from the Johns Hopkins Medical Children’s Center, where a large, randomised double-blind study showed that the drug fluvoxamine was an effective treatment for anxiety in children. This drug is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), which causes the neurotransmitter serotonin to accumulate in the synapses in the brain. Supplies of the drug were provided by Solvay Pharmaceuticals, who also gave research support (i.e., money) to the RUPP centres. The trial ran for only eight weeks, which does not make it a measure of the long-term effects of such a drug on the developing brains of children.21
Methylphenidate hydrochloride is a core member of the group