SPIEGEL Interview with Jerome Kagan: 'What About Tutoring Instead of Pills?'

[sysop]

Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan is one of the world's leading experts in child development. In a SPIEGEL interview, he offers a scathing critique of the mental-health establishment and pharmaceutical companies, accusing them of incorrectly classifying millions as mentally ill out of self-interest and greed.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...847500,00.html

[radoxer]

A toned down version:

I totally agree. The human condition is not simple. We need to stop listening to so called American wisdom.

If a person is dying from an inherited vulnerability to cancer they do not massacre a school with a gun.

But if aberrations in the brain chemistry are masked and enlarged by them reproducing soon we will have hundreds of people who would be mass murderers without medication.

In short magnifying physical abnormalities by successfully treating them is nowhere near as dangerous as treating mental illness. For example letting two apparently normal people reproduce, both of whom would be paranoid psychopaths without medication.

Soon all our personalities will be decided by a doctor as our true ones will be insane from inheritance. And no society can thrive if we are all a doctor's idea of normal.