The No Child Left Behind Act was a federal law passed in 2001 with the stated intention of improving the academic performance of American youth. A particular focus was on children from disadvantaged homes. Under the program any ADHD-diagnosed child qualified for special education services, and Medicaid and other funding would even pay for their psychotropic medication.

    Consequently, between 2003 and 2007 there was a 57 percent increase in ADHD diagnoses among disadvantaged children from poorer, less-resourced schools. Children receiving benefits under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) are diagnosed with ADHD at a rate 1.7 times higher than children not on TANF.

     Nearly 11 percent of the 1.6 million American Indian and Alaska Native children under the age of eighteen have been labeled with ADHD, the highest of any ethnic category of disadvantaged youth.

     Their prescription medications – including those amphetamines like Adderall, Concerta and Vyvanse for treating ADHD – can be covered by the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003.

     That’s easy money for the Big Pharma manufacturers of these amphetamine based stimulants.

     Unfortunately, that’s almost 200,000 Native American youth being subjected to the dangerous side effects experienced by almost half of those who take these stimulants: trouble sleeping, irritability, high blood pressure, tics, anxiety, depression.

     There’s another even scarier factor in that high incidence of Native American children being targeted with ADHD diagnoses.

     In 2013 Psychiatrist Elise Leonard, a deputy director of behavioral health for the U.S. Department of Health Human Services Indian Health Service, Phoenix, asserted that ADHD is “about 80 percent genetically determined.” That idea of a biological cause has of course long since been thoroughly debunked.

     But Psychiatrist Leonard’s bogus assertion follows a long history, going back to the early 1900s, of labeling Native Americans “feebleminded” and the American eugenics movement’s targeting of indigenous Americans for elimination.

     Psychologist Lewis Terman, a prominent advisor to the American Eugenics Society, published a paper in Psycho-Asthenics that he’d presented to the Eugenics Society on “borderline cases” in which he describes children having “racial dullness without feeblemindedness in the ordinary sense.” In it Terman wrote “Our experience shows that
the average child of Mexican or half-breed Indian parentage falls somewhere near this level.”

     Terman theorized that a national eugenics movement would assist in “curtailing the reproduction of feeblemindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency.”

     In 1928 Terman joined the Human Betterment Foundation, a Pasadena-based eugenics group that promoted the enforcement of compulsory sterilization laws in California.

     Terman’s own Stanford-Binet test for IQ was used until the 1960s to satisfy the legal criteria needed for the compulsory sterilization of the feebleminded in numerous state laws that could affect an unknown number of Native children and adults. Such laws were closely scrutinized (and admired) by visiting German psychiatrists who had themselves been charged with constructing the Nazi race extermination policies, per the Indian Country Today News.

     Terman was a firm believer in attempts to improve the human race through selective and restrictive breeding. His “racial dullness and feeble-mindedness” concepts not only made their way into popular culture, but they also became part of the description of ADD, the precursor of ADHD, in the early DSMs.

     All of which points to an uncomfortable harmonic between earlier Nazi psychiatrists labeling and then exterminating ethnic populations and the current indiscriminate and sometimes marginally racist categories of “mental disorder” voted on by American psychiatrists for inclusion in their DSMs.