...I don't think it's for bystanders to judge whether it's right or wrong to use meds in that particular case.
I agree with you in a way, but in a way I don't. I think American society needs to do some serious questioning about these drugs.
Interesting:
today's NY Times has an Op-Ed piece on Ritalin. It was actually worse than I thought:
three million children are being given these drugs.
Back in the 1960s I, like most psychologists, believed that children with difficulty concentrating were suffering from a brain problem of...inborn origin. Just as Type I diabetics need insulin to correct problems with their inborn biochemistry, these children were believed to require attention-deficit drugs to correct theirs. It turns out, however, that there is little to no evidence to support this theory.
But questions continued to be raised....Ritalin and Adderall...are stimulants. So why do they appear to calm children down? Some experts argued that because the brains of children with attention problems were different, the drugs had a mysterious paradoxical effect on them.
However, there really was no paradox. Versions of these drugs had been given to World War II radar operators to help them stay awake and focus on boring, repetitive tasks. And when we reviewed the literature on attention-deficit drugs again in 1990 we found that all children, whether they had attention problems or not, responded to stimulant drugs the same way.
And:
Moreover, while the drugs helped children settle down in class, they actually increased activity in the playground. Stimulants generally have the same effects for all children and adults. They enhance the ability to concentrate, especially on tasks that are not inherently interesting or when one is fatigued or bored, but they don�t improve broader learning abilities.
