Funding Pills, Not Schools

I was going to write about my weekend in Vermont today, but I saw an article in the NYTimes this morning that completely and irreversibly changed my mind.  At least for today that is.  It was simply the title of the article that immediately sucked me in, "Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School".  Does anything seem wrong with this title to anybody else?  Does this not raise a million red flags at once about a serious problem we are having in this country?  Even if no one else seems particularly interested or alarmed about this topic, I am as I have 1 year old son who will eventually be entering a school.  If anyone else ever reads the NYTimes or other news source, you have probably seen a headline related to pills for ADD or ADHD and students abuse of them in school.  A slew of articles have been written talking about how students in good schools are using the pills to treat these disorders to help with school work, tests, studying;  in essence, to help them get better grades and get into better colleges.  It doesn't simply stop at the high school level, the abuse continues into college at this point.  Prescriptions for the drugs, Adderall being the most common, have skyrocketed in recent years.  Five years ago in 2007, the number of children age 4-17 that were diagnosed with ADD or ADHD and consequently prescribed a drug to treat it was at 5.4 million children.  That was five years ago.  Imagine the number now?  Yet, ADD and ADHD diagnoses aside, the pills prescribed to treat those disorders will surely jump astronomically.  Here is why; doctors have taken to prescribing those pills simply to help children in school, even if they are perfectly fine otherwise and don't meet any of the criteria necessary for a diagnoses of one of the disorders mentioned above. 

The main issue here is that doctors have now taken it upon themselves (not all doctors mind you) to help children in school who are not receiving the help they need.  The doctor's version of help is to prescribe pills for these children to boost their grades.   They claim they are doing a service to these children and families because the schools are incapable of helping the children.  Essentially, doctors are taking it upon themselves to reform the schools because there is not enough money flowing to the schools.  What a load of crap.  What has our country come to when we decide that it is more efficient to drug the kids going to school than to make meaningful reforms in the schools themselves.  If you look at our health care system (or should I say sick care system) and education system in this country, you wouldn't be that surprised.  Most of these pill that are prescribed are covered under one type of insurance or another, so for a family to have pills prescribed to every one of their children it is cheaper, and easier, than working with the schools and students to get to the bottom of any issue their children are having.  Do the pills help in the short term?  The evidence would say that they do, however, no one really knows what the long term effects on the children are.  There is already a growing body of evidence that suggests these pills can be linked to growth suppression, increased risk of high blood pressure, and in some cases, psychotic episodes.  I have an issue with the over diagnoses of ADD and ADHD to begin with.  Add this new wave of presriptions to help children in school and I am done.  All I know is, if my son ever has any issues in school, whether or not he ever displays signs of these two disorders, he will never be prescribed a pill to help with it.  There are other methods that work to help children through their school years but most importantly, I will not show my son that the way to improve anything in life is through a pill. 

We have an issue in this country; we are pill poppers galore.  No matter what type of ailment we have, imaginary or real, there is a pill to take care of it, send us off to never never land, and keep reality at bay.  By taking a pill for anything, we are never curing anything, we are merely covering up symptoms.  When was the last time you heard of a person who was put on blood pressure medication and their blood pressure returned to the point where they could be taken off of it, all because of the medication.  The answer is, you haven't because it has not happened to anyone.  The only time a person is taken off of blood pressure medication is when they alter their lifestyle to naturally lower their blood pressure, the pill never does it.  The same goes with ADD and ADHD.  While the disorder may fade once a child reaches adulthood, the disorder isn't "reversed" or "treated" by taking any one of the pills available, rather, the pills alter the brain in such a way that the child is able to "function" properly.  (That calls into question what we consider "functioning properly" when associated with children.   But that's another topic for another day.)  Carrying this line on, by drugging our kids to counteract an inferior school and to allow them to get better grades, we are not improving the school system, we are merely putting a sugar coating on it and making things seem OK because all of a sudden kids are getting better grades.  To me, it was scary to just look at the picture at the head of the article.  It shows a mother and one of her sons sitting together and her son with her looks totally zonked out, his eyes are baggy, red underneath, and he doesn't really look "with it".  Yet he is getting good grades so everything must be just fine.  To note, all of this mother's children are prescribed some sort of pill to help them in school.  Its no longer "mother's little helper" it has now become, "little Johnny's helper"  (or "little Suzie's helper" to make sure I am gender neutral or whatever).  Our pill popping culture has gone too far and unfortunately it doesn't look like it will turn around any time soon.  Oh, by the way, does anyone know of a pill to help me make money without working?  If there is, I want it....(I hope you know I am being overly sarcastic by this point).