There is always something wrong with your child.

In quite a few of the Ads on the website (bonkersinstutute.org), the promise of “curing” an over-active, misbehaving child is the focus. The Ads colorful descriptions of “problem” behavior in elementary school children would lead the reader to believe that there exists a pill that will transform their unruly offspring into, for all intents and purposes, a miniature adult. And as grotesque as the idea is that advertisers and drug manufacturers would suggest drugging children in order to make them behave, the reality of the situation is much worse: the convincing of adults that there is something seriously and medically amiss with their child, and therefore the behavior perfectly normal for a child is something deviant and abnormal and warrants medication and therapy.

The article titled “He Can’t Help It, He Has MBD,” (http://www.bonkersinstitute.org/medshow/kidhelp.html) paints an image of a disease so discreet, so well hidden, that it takes a professional to even notice its existence. The description of the dysfunction is so ambiguous and obscure it is a wonder the drug companies were even able to convince anybody of its existence. For example, in the paragraph of the advertisement describing this potential problem, the article says that although this problem, Minimal Brain Dysfunction or MBD, is the most common problem seen in children, “its existence is often unrecognized and its prevalence is almost always underestimated.” It sure seems as though this is something that, while most likely actually existing, is being blown way out of proportion in order to scare parents into medicating their children, or at least leading to false diagnosis.

The article goes on to continue to refute the idea that this problem does not exist, claiming “Because the child may function quite normally on a one-to-one basis . . . clinical impressions from a single office visit may be misleading.” The mere fact that the majority of this article is spent trying to remind the reader over and over that this is a REAL disease and your child most likely has should cause you to raise your eyebrows. The drug, as it says, doesn’t show any effects on about one third of the children who take it. Perhaps this is simply the number of children who don’t truly have anything wrong with them.

Children are over-active, hyper, easily distracted, and incredibly emotional. It is true that some children act out in these ways much more than others, but this does not inherently mean that there is something mentally wrong with them that needs to be fixed with some sort of drug. The headline explaining the article even says, “See the creation of a discrete disease entity before your very eyes! Before they could sell the drug, they had to sell the idea of the disease itself” which more or less sets the tone for the ridiculous medical explanation of this disease.