Newman’s Chapter 8 discussion about the increasing use of drugs to treat ADHD in children in the United States raises many questions. Newman makes the suggestion that perhaps in too many cases the school system and parents are translating “inconvenient behavior” of children into individual sickness so that they can be treated with medical remedies such as drugs (Newman, p. 252). His idea is that we are medicating children to enforce conformity and uphold the values of a society in which children are supposed to be “well-adjusted, well-behaved, sociable, attentive, high-performing, and academically adept” (Newman, p. 252). Newman also says that labeling disruptiveness as an individual disorder protects the school system’s legitimacy and authority. Enforcing order and conformity may be important goals for an educational institution and making life a bit easier for parents whose ADHD children are difficult to deal with may be good reasons to medicate children with ADHD, but these medications may rob some of these children of achieving their highest potential.
In an Abnormal Psychology class I took a couple of years ago, I recall learning that there may be just a fine line between genius and various mental disorders. With today’s increased emphasis on using pharmaceuticals to “normalize” the human experience, you have to wonder how many of the millions of American school kids taking drugs for ADHD are doing so at the expense of discovering their full range of creativity and talents. Michele Novotni, Ph.D., a psychologist, said that her clients don’t like the way taking the drugs make them feel. “They say it stifles their creativity and spontaneity—and that they feel like impostors, not their real selves.” For that reason, Novotni says, her patients are often tempted to take a vacation from taking the drugs. Her comments reminded me of a book I read a couple of years ago: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by K. Jamison. Jamison, a psychiatrist suffering from manic-depressive disorder, today called Bipolar-I Disorder. Jamison knew on many levels that taking lithium could level out the extreme highs of her manic episodes, but she did not like to take it because it robbed her of her best creative thinking ability. Much of Jamison’s book is about the balance between medication to control and manage her extreme mood swings and the high cost of taking the medicine in terms of its effect on her “real self.”
Apparently, the same issue confronts children with ADHD as well as their parents, as discussed in this article by Jeff Zaslow, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who contributes to an ADHD-related website. http://www.hopetohealing.com/media/articles/movingon/movingon1.htm
In one of his articles, Zaslow asks, “What if Einstein Had Taken Ritalin?” It's a fair question. How many of the creators of the world’s art, music and literary masterpieces and most significant scientific discoveries would have been put on ADHD medication if they were children in the today’s American school system? It is something to think about.
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