My youngest son Jason is a fine, responsible, active man of 41 and a joy in my life. He is a college graduate who makes his living as a paramedic/fireman. As a professional, he knows a great deal about the science and effects of many drugs on the human system. When he was in the first grade he was termed “hyperactive,” what came to be known in the pop psychology of pharmacology as ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder and, later, ADHD, or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. That is, Jason was a natural boy of six with an abundance of energy and intelligence who was bored out of his gourd, bored to tears, bored to action and movement by sitting at a desk in a row while a teacher tried to keep order in her classroom through conformity and rote memorization. There were aspects of his life at home that were disturbing and unacceptable to him, and school was one place to vent those aggravations in his life. He did not sit still nor remain quiet for the standardization that is a public school first grade classroom. He disrupted his class. He was not a good soldier nor a candidate for the future organization men of America. I was neither surprised nor as disturbed as I should have been by his social recalcitrance, and, as a consequence, I was not nearly attentive enough to it. Jason’s energy and intelligence were a gift to him, a joy and a pleasure (and, on occasion, an amazing frustration) to me. It is not hard to understand that his school teacher and administrators took a different view. And they had the perfect solution to what they saw as Jason’s problem and that I viewed (and view) as their problem—-daily doses of Ritalin.
Ritalin is the brand name for methylphenidate, a “mild” stimulant of the central nervous system, whose exact mode of action on that system is not completely understood. Though I did not know it at the time, Ritalin produces hallucinations and paranoia in a significant number (about nine percent) of those who take it. In the pharmacological/psychiatric trade, it is credited with “unmasking” latent clinical depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in its users, conditions which that métier addresses with regular doses of other drugs whose exact mode of action on the central nervous system are also incompletely understood. It is my opinion that the word “unmasking” is erroneous; “causing” is the more accurate word. Alcohol, too, is known to “unmask” those same conditions as well as a variety of other social disorders, including hostility, violence, idiocy, lethal driving, boorish behavior, really boorish conversation and even more boorish breath, but to my knowledge no moderately dependable person prescribes more or other drugs as a cure. Common sense and objective observation dictates that the cure to such “unmasking” is to cease ingesting the original drug. While my knowledge of Ritalin was scant, my instincts were excellent and my personal, experiential knowledge of many other drugs was significant. And no one was going to secure my permission to chemically mutilate my son’s behavior or mood so that he could more easily blend in with the school furniture. If only instinctively, I knew what Dr. Peter Breggin wrote many years later in the New York Times: “Attention deficit disorder does not reflect children’s attention deficits but our lack of attention to their needs.” That lack in myself at the time it was needed is something I deeply regret.
I was called to a meeting with Jason’s teacher, the principal and the school nurse. I knew that Jason’s problems in school were a direct result of his life at home (i.e. my own problems and failings, stresses and disorders), as well as the school’s inability to deal with each child’s individual needs. Being all too familiar with hallucinations and paranoia, I assumed they believed all of Jason’s unwillingness to fit into the school curriculum was my fault.  Nevertheless, with some if not full awareness of my own failures, contradictions and hypocrisies in the matter, I told them I thought they were crazy to be drugging children in order to get them through a day of school. Even then, sitting in a room with three proper and competent educators, including Jason’s teacher, a beautiful single woman, who I sometimes saw drinking and dancing in the local bars, I was acutely aware of the incongruity of the scene: three proper, conservatively dressed American public school educators of the 1970s and me—dressed in faded denim pants held up with a colorful hand-dyed tied woolen belt from Argentina, huaraches, a turtle-neck shirt and a sheep skin vest, a head of black hair falling to below my shoulder blades and a full beard to the middle of my chest—discussing the advantages and disadvantages of schools legally drugging six year olds with the consent of their parents. I assume they were aware of the situation’s ironies, and I hope it gave them a smile and some insight into our culture’s contradictions. It certainly did me.
(I refused the consent and Jason never became a Ritalin junkie. He is now a fine and responsible and active man, and still a joy in my life. He is thankful that I did not allow the entrenched school system to flood his developing system with mild stimulants. He has told me so many times.)
That, of course, was in the early days of systemically altering human behavior with chemicals. It is now an enormous business having a profound effect on our culture, the practice of medicine and the living experience of millions of people. They are not health food, but anti-depressants are a staple of the diet of the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind. I, for one, agree with Dr. Breggin about ADD, and his point applies to several other maladies of our time. Their solutions lie in attention to and confrontation with their roots, not in masking their manifestations with chemicals. The quick chemical fix, whether it be insecticide, pesticide, mild stimulant of the human central nervous system, anti-depressant or defoliant, has always had a hidden cost. They may make life easier in the short run, and it is surely good business for the pharmacology and petrochemical industries, but there is always runoff, and there is always an unexpected consequence somewhere downstream, and it is cumulative.