James Gorman has an insightful essay on our growing dependance and indulgence in medicines and drugs . . . Essay: The Altered Human Is Already Here . . . but the bit that struck me the most is here:

Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 10 million children took prescription medication for three months or longer in 2002, and preschoolers, another study found, are now the fastest growing group of children receiving antidepressants.

This is the scary thing. That’s a lot of kids artificially being made high. There is a growing tendancy to give kids a diagnosis that calls for mood-altering or management drugs. There are plenty of non-drug-based management techniques for kids that will do them a lot more good. The thing is that most of them take time and parents and doctors and teachers and administrators want quick fixes that immediately render the kids into manageable states . . . often to an inappropriate degree.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubts that there are kids who need chemical-based help or that the number of troubled youths is growing (remember when I posted about the survey that showed a significant number of Taipei fourth graders have thought about suicide) . . . however, for many of the kids currently on anti-depressants, it’s a system cop-out.

Kids don’t get messed up in isolation. Family and social dynamics are very very important. When kids manifest problems it is usually a symptom of dysfunction within the family that the kids are expressing. We can fix symptoms with drugs but we’re masking the real problems.

Kids need to learn to cope. There are more appropriate cognitive and behavioral approaches that will help them than giving them happy happy joy joy pills. Guided Imagery has been proven to work wonders as has religious centering (or something akin to caring religious teaching for the non-religious types – and even religious types need to focus on the non-guilt levels and stay away from the thrilling fire-and-brimstone stuff which simply aggravates problems more than solves them). Dream therapy or dreamwalking is wonderful for dealing with things.

Please please please please . . . before you choose to opt for the drug approach to managed children, consider who is being helped most, the administrators or teachers or parents who want easily managed passive zombie children or the child who needs to learn to deal with life’s hurts in socially acceptable ways.

Pick up a copy of Positive Discipline and connect with your child . . . at the human level . . . if your child is one of those who need managed care of some sort, I am sorry for you and my heart really goes out to you . . . and I encourage you to follow your doctor’s advice . . . however, make sure all avenues have been exhausted first.