A Conversation with Richard DeGrandpre: About Our Ritalin Nation

Michael F. Shaughnessy - May 12, 2005
Senior Columnist EducationNews.org
Eastern New Mexico University
Portales, New Mexico

The rising incidence of Ritalin, Adderol, Cylert, Strattera and Concerta and other psychotropic drugs is a major societal concern. In this interview, Richard DeGrandpre discusses the issue and his book "Ritalin Nation" Richard DeGrandpre has a Ph.D. in psychopharmacology from the University of Vermont (which he received in 1992). He is the author of "Ritalin Nation" (1999, Norton), "Digitopia" (2001, Random House), and The Cult of Pharmacology (in press, Duke University Press). The latter is a history of drugs in 20th century America.This book will appear later this year. His weblog/blog is www.anxiousmind.com.

1) You have written about Ritalin and it's use in the Schools. What are your biggest concerns?

I don't think concerns is the right term here. Being concerned about giving school children drugs began in the 1970s, and then "concern" was the right idea. Now we're way past that and into the realm of denial and acceptance. Acceptance within society and schools has also become synonymous with blindness. People, including parents, teachers, and administrators don't see the big, historical picture of what has happened: schools, like so much of society, are failing children in the worse possible ways. School should be a celebration of life - a festival; it should not be the house of coercion and external control that it has become.

2) Attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity and impulsivity seem to be well known words in education circles. Do these things really exist or are a lot of teachers all wrong?

Where were all these problems a century ago among fifth graders? A poll of grade-school teachers taken some decades ago found that chewing gum and "cutting in line" were the greatest problems facing the classroom. They caught a break and didn't know it. Of course, taking developmental processes that are ongoing in the child and his (or her) life and turning them into static "entities" fixed within the child has always been popular. In philosophy this is referred to as "essentialism." Sometimes this essence is positive ("brilliance"); other times it's negative ("ADHD"). The public remains so unsophisticated about issues of development that it's mislead daily about the connection between mind, body, genes, brain and behavior. Every pattern of behavior has a representation in the brain, by definition, but identifying such a pattern in the brain does not explain it. That's like finding the hinges on the back of the door and thinking that explains why it opens when it does and why it closes. It's silly and yet people believe it. Consider the example of chemical states of the brain: Numerous studies have now documented comparable effects of psychosocial treatments on the brain as drugs have, yet the treatment effects of drugs are still interpreted as evidence that the problem has neurochemical (i.e., biological) roots. In philosophy this is known as "mind-body dualism," something that was said to have been eliminated in modern neuroscience. But it's very much alive and well. Embracing labels is also a self-affirming process and a self-fulfilling one, since our failure to grasp the complexities of development leads to our failure to direct and change it. Once viewed as broken, the child only receives half measures. But there are thousands of documented cases of radical change when this kind of labeling is rejected.

3) Do you think excessive television watching may have something to do with the drastic amount of Ritalin being prescribed?

Television is emblematic of what has happened to the world of childhood in the last three decades. It's both a symptom and a cause of a culture that's become passive and virtual. But TV would not harm a child if everything else was strong in the child's life. Lots of physical play; lots of social play; and lots of proper social engagement with adults. Meals together held in peace, would be nice. Parents who spend big chunks of time with their kids, no matter what the child's age, would also be nice. It's so clear here how expectations become a reality - and boy have our expectations for children fallen, and fallen further. Parents, stressed out in their adult lives, freely give up responsibility for raising their children in any profound sense. Just the other night I saw a movie director (Mike Nichols) claiming on TV that how your children turn out is just dumb luck. Maybe so, but is this a historical fact, specific to parenting today, or a biological fact . There is so much common-sense evidence that contradicts the view of biological determinism. But again, acceptance is blindness. Even identical twins raised together often differ dramatically in their psychology. This shows that there is a certain wild contingency to how kids develop. But as every economist knows, individual variation may nevertheless reveal considerable order when looked at statistically. And this is what teachers and parents have to work with: not determining every attribute of a child, but trying to shift the odds in favor of him or her. And still we're doing just the opposite, creating the myth that parenting is less important than biology. At a time when the culture is most toxic, parents are being told that what they do will have no affect on their child's development and mental well-being. "Allegories and myths are ways that societies keep track of their contradictions," writes author Laura Kipnis, "new ones are constructed as required."

4) At one time, the only medication for attention deficit was Ritalin. We  now have Adderall, Cylert, Concerta and in extended release form. Are we  overmedicating children?:

Worse than these drugs are the antipsychotic drugs now given to children. This is something that has appeared largely since I took up the Ritalin/ADHD issue in the mid-1990s, and it is simply grotesque. The medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex will continue to evolve until a brave new world is upon us - a time when not being on pharmaceutical drugs will be viewed as deviant and dangerous. Signs of this are already emerging, as when one parent accuses another of child abuse when he or she refuses to put their child on the latest cure-all drug. Or maybe I'm just paranoid and need to increase my own medication.

5) Let's face it. Teachers have a difficult task in front of them. An  extremely disruptive student can wreck havoc in the classroom. How are  teachers expected to cope with hyperactive and children with attentional problems?

Notice that this question acknowledges the changing situation in the classroom - a problem of chaos that is not due to growing class sizes or the sparing of the rod. Children are a reflection of society and we cannot expect teachers to keep the dam from collapsing as child development runs amuck. What is more, as students become more unruly and unstable, teachers burn out. A single student can be more exhausting then all the rest of the day's children combined. The best teachers will leave and then, a generation later, the best will never arrive in the first place, knowing the hell that the classroom has become. Just look at this trajectory and ask yourself, will drugs really stem the tide? I think not. We don't need new, private schools. We need a new school philosophy, and on that begins with the realization that we have little left to lose.

6) Can parents be expected to work with their children who have attention deficit at home?

Parenting is where it all begins, but of course parenting takes place in a larger cultural context. The difficult child challenges the skills of most any parent, and experts can help. By "expert" I do not mean someone skilled at taking responsibility off the parent's shoulders by casting labels and writing prescriptions. I'm thinking of those psychologist, counselors, et cetera, who have a proven track record in helping parents help themselves and their children with these problems.

7) What do you see as some of the main cultural concerns contributing to this Ritalin Nation of ours?

The world has been overtaken by a set of highly institutionalized priorities that has nothing to do with human well being. There are few signs of true progress in the world today. According to the UN and other organizations, those developing nations that are experiencing the greatest industrial change are also experiencing dramatic increases in schizophrenia, depression and drug abuse. We're all active participants in a runaway global system bent on centralized control, competition and greed. It's that simple. Accepting one false assumption early on (e.g., that continuous economic growth is a necessary factor for human progress), is like taking the wrong path into a woods early on. Your decisions thereafter may be error free and yet your travels can all go terribly wrong, and then it's too late. The problems children are having, and the choice of medicating them with drugs and denial, is just two of a whole host a growing problems, each reinforcing the other. Climate change, for instance, is the ecological equivalent of hyperactivity. And tinkering with our atmospheric emissions is the therapeutic equivalent to Ritalin: it just allows for the system to keep marching on, unaltered and unbridled.

8) What are your seven great gripes, if you will, against the psychiatric establishment?

The psychiatric establishment has no credibility whatsoever in my view. As studies show, psychiatric medicine has almost nothing to offer the general population that works over the long run; not Ritalin, not Prozac, not Zyprexa. What is more, psychiatric medicine has become a front organization for the drug industry. As such, it now stands in the way of real solutions that focus on the everyday conditions of our lives, just as it obscures the fact that mental health today is (or should be) largely a social issue, not a medical one.