I WRITE following recent press coverage of a study concerning additives in food and poor behaviour in children.

The behaviour, labelled by psychiatrists as the spurious condition Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), has been linked to additives in children's food.

While psychiatrists may refute this study, it remains that they themselves have never produced a single test to scientifically validate the existence of hyperactivity or ADHD.

As presented in countless illustrations in psychiatric and medical journals, the brain has been dissected, its parts labelled and analysed, while the public has been assaulted with the latest psychiatric theories of how the physical and chemical composition of the brain determines behaviour, mental disorders, or disabilities. What is lacking, as with all psychiatric theory, is scientific validity.

Claiming that normal childhood behaviour is a mental disorder and that drugs are the solution to hyperactive children, psychiatrists and psychologists have insinuated themselves into positions of authority over children.

Thomas Moore, author of Prescriptions for Disaster, warns that the current use of drugs is taking "appalling risks" with a generation of children.

The drug is given, he said, for "short-term control of behaviour, not to reduce any identifiable hazard to children's health.

Such large-scale chemical control of human behaviour has not been previously undertaken in our society outside of nursing homes and mental institutions."

Undiagnosed, untreated physical conditions are often wrongly interpreted as mental or behavioural disorders'.

A reaction to chemical additives in food is a physical condition, and their removal, according to the study, can produce marked results.

And it could result in more NHS funds to treat real physical conditions. In England in 2006, the NHS drugs bill for ADHD drugs was £29.2m. This study will undoubtedly hurt the vested interests that rely on parents and the public believing the psychiatric rhetoric that children have a so-called chemical imbalance in their brains, and that they then need dangerous psychiatric drugs to resolve it. The notion of a chemical imbalance has never been proven. There are no tests to support such psychiatric assertions.

This study can relieve badly behaved children of the kiddie coke chemical straitjackets that generate huge revenue for a psychiatric industry that's profit-driven.

It's worth considering what would happen if the idea of hyperactivity or so-called ADHD was resolved. In that event, the psychiatrist would be out of business.

BRIAN DANIELS, East Grinstead, West Sussex.