And the One that Mother Gives You

I am not a medical professional nor do I play one on TV. I do not have a degree in psychiatry. Although I am a frequent blood donor, I still look away when the needle goes in my arm and I get queasy when my wife watches ER reruns. In short, my medical advice should be considered with a mound of salt and is only marginally better than my insights into the stock market: “Keep investing till it’s gone.” With those caveats firmly in place, here’s my thought: it’s entirely likely that your child is over-medicated.

At the very least, she is likely on the wrong meds and the wrong path.

I have seen the good that psycho-stimulants can do. For motivated students who choose to focus on their studies but are distracted by attentional issues, adderol, vivance, stytera and the like can be helpful. But for students who don’t WANT to attend to memorizing the capitals of the 50 states (yes, this vacuous curriculum is still taught in the age of information. One can hardly come up with a less relevant curriculum although alchemy-the “science” of changing lead into gold might come close) these prescriptions are likely to have the following problems.

1) There’s a pill for that.

Kids who internalize the lesson that pills are okay are more likely to take non-prescription, recreational, life-destroying, deadly drugs wouldn’t you think? Pills for attention, pills for sleep, pills to wake up, pills to remind you to take your other pills, pills to make you feel good, pills to make you not feel bad.

2) There’s another pill for that.

When the pills for attention don’t work and the kid is still boinging across the classroom like Speedy Gonzalez on fast forward, frantic parents try SSRIs to cure bi-polarity which doesn’t work because the kid wasn’t bi-polar to begin with so the desperate parents move on to atypical anti-psychotics followed by mood stabilizers. That’s a lot of pills for a kid who was just basically energetic and had trouble sitting still and attending to vacuous, mind-numbing curriculum. (Do YOU know the capital of Vermont? Neither do I.)

3) Decreased effectiveness over time

Remember in Flowers for Algernon when the cognitively impaired protagonist, after becoming the smartest guy who ever lived, starts to lose his ability and slide back down to where he was, once again unable to read or write well or understand social cues? There is a growing body of research to suggest that psycho-stimulants help effect gains for about three years and then the kids are no better than where they were. This result is bad news for the pharmaceutical companies and worse news for a generation of drugged young people.

So what’s the answer?

Surely, “go out and play” isn’t all there is to this issue although I would argue that “a tired dog is a good dog.” It’s developmentally inappropriate for elementary school children to sit at desks all day and then be expected to produce worksheets all night. There is something to be said for lying on your back on a warm afternoon trying to figure out what the clouds look like and then rolling down the hill in a heap. Whenever I hear about a kid who won’t sit still and “doesn’t attend” to curriculum and “refuses” to pay attention in the classroom and distains homework and “won’t” go to bed at a reasonable hour, I think about taking said kid on a four-day/three-night hiking and camping trip 40 miles from the nearest electrical outlet or bathroom. Show me a kid walking through a slot canyon in Utah in river water up to his knees for six hours a day and I’ll show you a kid who is beyond eager to fall asleep before you can say, “Did anyone remember to tie the backpacks up in a tree so the bears don’t get them like they did the year before last?” I’ll also show you a kid who will eat anything that doesn’t move and some things that do. I don’t know whether or not there are atheists in foxholes, but I’m pretty sure there are no fussy eaters on camping trips. And I see kids labeled as ADHD and heavily medicated in the city who are able to “attend” just fine to the more subtle cues of functioning in the great outdoors.

In Dungeons and Dragons, players get to pick characteristics like strength, speed, agility, and emotional stability. (Okay, I made up the emotional stability part, but that would have been fun, don’t you think?) So suppose you got to pick the features of your kid. Would you pick smart? Sure. Would you pick motivated? Of course. Would you pick successful? Why not?

But what if, like the ring of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, there was a price to pay for having all those desirable traits?

The qualities smart and stressed don’t HAVE to go together, but lately I don’t see too many kids at the top of their class who got there effortlessly. Instead I see sleep deprived kids whose educations make no sense to them. I see unhappy kids. Loving parents might want to think about internalizing the following mantra: “I’d rather have a joyful, content, fun-loving, sober carpenter’s assistant than a highly successful, stressed-to-the-point-of-snapping, addicted, frenetic, miserable orthopedic surgeon.

Because as my grandmother often remarked, “You’re a long time dead” and I’m fairly thoroughly convinced that there is no pill for that.