The Ritalin Wars, and The New Religion of ADHD

As snippet from a NY Times column on the recent study about brain development in children

So why, this week, did the gloves come out, with the armies of all that is Good taking on the usual forces of Evil psychopharmacology? Why did my stomach drop so quickly to my knees, why was I so quick to think it possible that, after countless interviews and lectures and hours of reading, I’d simply fallen for a hoax manufactured by the drug companies and wrested upon the innocent?

Facts don’t have much sway when you’re in the grip of a religion. And the beliefs underlying the Ritalin wars (I am using “Ritalin” here as shorthand for the whole practice of diagnosing children and treating them with psychotropic drugs) have truly now become like a creed. They’re only superficially about diagnosis and medication. For most people, they’re more profoundly about a sense of menace bearing down upon the world of our children.

There’s a sense that greater powers, profit-driven and amoral, are pulling the strings in our children’s lives. There’s a sense that those who should best protect us — our government and our doctors — are so corrupted that they can no longer do the job. There’s a sense that childhood has, in many ways, been denatured, that youth has been stolen, that the range of human acceptability has been narrowed for our kids to a point that it has become soul-crushingly inhuman.

The author backs away from this dark vision, saying that maybe it is not so, and muttering about the casualties of these Ritalin Wars, the children. This is certainly a hard pill to swallow for any one.

And yet, as we look back at the other scandals of our age, the Enrons and the Haliburtons, the scandal of the Iraq War, and others, we desperately want the drug industry to be pure as Snow White, and as pristine as the americas before the arrival of the White European. Sadly, it might not be so.