Name Fred Baughman | Role Medical Doctor | |
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Fred Baughman (born 1932) is best known as an outspoken critic of psychiatry, and is reported as insisting that attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is "a fraud perpetrated by the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries on families anxious to understand their childrens' [sic] behavior". Baughman has testified before the United States Congress, and has been interviewed on PBS on the topic of ADHD. He has made several appearances on talk shows, and has written several self-published books. Baughman has also been a medical adviser for the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), an advocacy group established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology, noted opponents of modern psychiatry.
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Education and career
For 35 years, Baughman was an adult and child neurologist in private practice. He retired in 1993. Baughman was involved in chromosome research earlier in his career. He was also director of the Western Michigan Birth Defects Clinic. Baughman has been a medical expert for CCHR, an advocacy group established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Baughman has testified in court and before Congress. He has written for the print media, and has been interviewed on the radio.
Critic of ADHD
Baughman frequently uses the terms "fraud" and "fake" to describe ADHD. His personal website focuses on the criticism of ADHD. He coauthored the book The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Makes "Patients" Out of Normal Children. In 1998, he made a video titled ADHD — Total, 100% Fraud, and in 2005 he was also featured in The Drugging of our Children. For his efforts, he accepted a reward for his work on ADHD from Narconon, an in-patient rehabilitation program founded by Scientologists.
Baughman's viewpoint on ADHD and ADHD medication are highly controversial. He has described how the psychiatric community commonly refers to mental disorders as "diseases" and then judges these disorders to be fraudulent based on the criteria for diseases. He has commented, "Once Ritalin or any psychiatric drug courses through their body, they are, for the first time, physically, neurologically, biologically, abnormal."
Viewpoint on pharmaceutical companies and government
In his article The ADHD conspiracy, Baughman states, "the only way the pharma-psychiatry-government cartel differs for the Cali, Medellin, Tijuana, and opium cartels of the world is that the pharma-psychiatry-government cartel target everyone, from cradle to grave—your parents, and grandparents in their nursing home beds, those truly physically ill, adding their never-essential drugs to essential drugs, compromising real medical and surgical treatment, and infants, toddlers, preschoolers and all they can force or court-order to swallow their brain-altering, brain-damaging, “chemical balancers.” We are warned by le Carre, that their power, in league with government, is the greatest of all threats to our liberty and right of self-determination". His information is widely considered to be very controversial.
Baughman's views on biological psychiatry
Baughman has been most critical of ADHD and "biological psychiatry." He has stated, "Biological psychology/psychiatry is a total perversion of medicine and science, and a fraud." During a PBS interview he stated, "Representing such things as depression, anxiety, conduct disorder, ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, learning disabilities as diseases absent any scientific proof, is to deceive the public. It preempts the public's right to informed consent in every single case."
Baughman has stated, about where psychiatric 'diseases' and 'epidemics' come from, "First you meet with the rest of the DSM Committee of the APA and, over cigars and drinks you invent a disease...not out of thin air but out of the troubled emotions and behaviors of entirely normal human beings, and call it a disease. Next you have bio-psychiatry researchers not really biologists, not really researchers or scientists, apply the tools of biology and medicine to these entirely normal persons (some infants and toddlers) and, in this way you create a scientific literature, that becomes the stuff of their scientific meetings. Next, their break-throughs regarding these diseases, not diseases at all become the stuff of press releases, and from their literature, of their text-books..."