Better living through chemistry

I have claimed on a number of occasions, only half jokingly, that had I gone to school in today's environment, the school system would have had me on Ritalin from K to 12.  There's no place in today's school system for the Class Clown, apparently.  Actually, there never was, but back in the day they didn't know what to do about it.  Now they do.

The New York Times reported Sunday that nearly 20 percent of all American high school boys have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).   Two thirds of those are being medicated with either Ritalin or Adderall.  We're looking today at an impressively high percentage of our youth who are diagnosed with a pathology requiring prescription drugs.

In a moving essay yesterday, entitled Diagnosis: Human, Ted Gup writes of his son who was diagnosed with ADHD in first grade, began receiving medication, and ended up dead of an alcohol and drug overdose at age 21, while a senior in college.  Gup admits that his boy had problems unrelated to ADHD, but he feels that his lifelong experience with Ritalin and Adderall made his transition into the drug culture all too easy.

But Gup's more interesting point is something different.  Many "normal" kids are now getting their hands on these drugs, because anti-ADHD drugs also provide an easy, pharmaceutical way for a non-ADHD student to focus on his studies and avoid distractions.  Just as an athlete uses steroids to improve physical performance, just as grieving survivors of deceased loved ones are using anti-depressants to restore daily functioning, many of today's most ambitious kids are using Ritalin and Adderall to heighten academic performance.  Any weakness in personality or performance is being diagnosed and medicated out of existence. Seemingly. Gup notes that the psychological profession, in the latest edition of its diagnostic manual, is now about to define some forms of what we consider "normal grief" to be a diagnosable pathology.

I fear that being human is itself fast becoming a condition. It’s as if we are trying to contain grief, and the absolute pain of a loss like mine. We have become increasingly disassociated and estranged from the patterns of life and death, uncomfortable with the messiness of our own humanity, aging and, ultimately, mortality.

I agree.  But I wonder if, in agreeing, I'm not really fighting against "progress," attempting to sweep back the tides of human history.

A few posts back, I discussed the science fiction novel, Revelation Space.   In that novel -- its events set five hundred years in the future -- electronic chips were routinely implanted in people's brains to add funds of specialized knowledge or to permit them to function at higher cognitive levels than would be possible by the unassisted normal brain.  These implants were considered normal, and were routinely used by anyone whose jobs required anything more than the most routine activities.

Is that where we're going?  Are what we are seeing now merely the earliest, most primitive attempts to raise our human capabilities by our use of drugs?  Drugs to perform physically like superhumans?  Drugs to master difficult academic work through superior powers of concentration?  Drugs permitting us to ignore the human emotions resulting from loss and tragedy, and thus continue in an uninterrupted fashion as productive members of society?

Maybe, but Gup warns us that we thereby risk losing those qualities that make us recognizably human, rather than well-oiled machines.  And in so doing, permitting ourselves to go through life living in an illusory world:

Instead of enhancing our coping skills, we undermine them and seek shortcuts where there are none, eroding the resilience upon which each of us, at some point in our lives, must rely. Diagnosing grief as a part of depression runs the very real risk of delegitimizing that which is most human — the bonds of our love and attachment to one another.

The D.S.M. [official psychological diagnostic manual] would do well to recognize that a broken heart is not a medical condition, and that medication is ill-suited to repair some tears. Time does not heal all wounds, closure is a fiction, and so too is the notion that God never asks of us more than we can bear. Enduring the unbearable is sometimes exactly what life asks of us.

Gup's words are moving and philosophical, but they may well fall on deaf ears.  His concerns do not seem to reflect the direction our society is moving.