Erin has written a great review of the film Food Inc, which seemingly takes the book Fast Food Nation to another level in terms of uncovering the hows and whys of our fast food diet.
But, and I genuinely hate to be this guy, I have to say that I found the above paragraph to be a little misleading. I’m a firm believer in the fact that the upswing in diagnoses of the above diseases/conditions is only because of a result in the increase of testing for such disorders.
50 years ago, there was no such thing as ADD, or mild dyslexia. But now we have these titles for them, and accommodate them accordingly. I don’t want to say that these conditions don’t exist, but I genuinely feel that we use them too much as an excuse nowadays.
Your kid is unruly and doesn’t listen to your instructions? He must have ADD. We’ve lost the ability, or, more likely, the willingness to label an individual as a “bad kid” and thus belittle his parents to boot. Instead, we prescribe shit like Ritalin and give the child more leeway in his actions.
And let’s be honest, do we know anything about the long-term effects of these behavioural drugs? Do we fuck. We’re basically doing a long-term experiment on unwitting and unconsenting participants. I struggle to see a morality in that.
When did we lose this method of social diagnosis? It’s as if we want to excuse every action as mere genetics or inevitable. We no longer want to say that people are bad parents, even though we know instinctively that they must be.
Look at things from a solely statistical viewpoint: 49.9% of parents are going to be “bad parents” in terms of the median. Yes, I’m simplifying massively, and ignoring the whole concept of orphans and so forth, but my point remains the same:
If we’re aiming for a particular threshold of behaviour amongst kids, then we have to admit that some parents are incapable of achieving that level in their children. But we shouldn’t be prescribing drugs to overcome that “problem”. We should be educating both the parents and children in an effort to improve their relationships and thus the kids’ behaviour.
Drugs are not the answer.
[To be clear, I’m not getting at Erin here. It’s just that her paragraph has got me thinking on the subject.]
Reblogged from: brieflynoted
Originally posted on: briefly noted
