An article in the Monday Toledo Blade (D 1) has spawned this column. As you may know, a portion of my profligate past was spent as a college teacher. For approximately 15 years at three different schools I taught Mass Communication and Journalism courses. Over the years I had an opportunity to interact with thousands of students from the early 1990’s through 2005. Throughout the course of my teaching career I noted that an increasing number of students requested special consideration for exam taking. Those students would have a permission form signed by either the campus health service or the tutorial program. Once, after receiving an inordinate number of special allowance requests, I stood before my class of roughly 220 students and gave a short lecture on the dangers of Ritalin. Following the class a sweet demure young lady told me that I had offended her because she had been on Ritalin for several years. At the next meeting of the class I asked how many of those attending were on or had ever taken Ritalin. Fully 60% of the hands were raised. My first thought was “huh?” My second thought was “what the hell is going on?”
Back in the ancient days when I was young, we had hyperactive kids who wouldn’t pay attention in class. We called them “ornery.” They were occasionally disruptive, but no more so than some of the rest of us who liked to stir the pot. Some of the restless ones did “OK” academically, and others struggled to advance through the grade levels designed by the government school. They did not, however, consume quantities of artificial compound behavior control drugs in order to provide a docile compliant classroom for the public union teacher to manage. My peers managed to graduate from the government monopoly school with most of their brain cells intact and unaltered. Most of the ornery types became solid citizens, and a couple of them were very successful entrepreneurs. The alarming rate with which we medicate our children alarms me. We appear to be discarding knowledge about long-term consequences for questionable short-term benefits.
There are some questions that I believe should be answered for a medical layperson like me. Aren’t there any natural alternatives to Ritalin? Are the medical community and the government school monopoly in the pocket of Big Pharma? Are the physicians and educators anti-natural treatments? Why do so many of our children require medicating? Is ADD or ADHD that prevalent? If so, why? Too much TV? Video games? Lousy diets? Chemical poisoning? Mutant genes? Teachers who are too lazy to deal with the active exuberance of youth? It seems to me that if we have so many of our children with attention and hyperactivity problems, there must be a root cause that should be addressed. It cannot be good for a nation to have so many of its youth medicated to allow for orderly interaction. Given the state of the nation today, young people may need hyperactivity to earn enough to pay their extreme taxes in the decades ahead.
It may be that our young people require medication because their abilities to focus and control their energy may be short-circuited by angst and contradiction. On the one hand government, advertising, schools, parents, D.A.R.E. officers and counselors continually warn the young people about the dangers of drugs, and then prescribe medications for every ill…real and imaginary. The psychological term is cognitive dissonance. It arises when one holds contradictory ideas. So, it would appear that each day our youth are encouraged to take their medications and their dissonance with a glass of water. Our obsession with finding the instant cure or magic bullet for every issue that confounds us has been manifested in our treatment of our children. We look to government to resolve every petty issue in our lives, and we expect medical and other experts to correct all our other perceived deficiencies. Until we begin to accept personal responsibility and develop problem solving skills, we’ll be dedicated to instant medication. The side effects, the after effects or the hangover could doom us all.
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