Ritalin – ILANA MERCER

Manly No More

Ilana Mercer — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I was stocking up on groceries at Fred Meyer when I heard this fretful falsetto. “Honey, look at these ingredients. Oh my God. Check the percentage of trans fats. It’s outrageous!” The fussing, believe it or not, was coming from a man. He was hopping up and down on spindly legs, beckoning his wife excitedly. I quickly moved on, thanking my lucky stars that the spouse had gravitated automatically to the hardware section of the store, and was itching to move on to Home Depot.

Whenever I venture out, I encounter this not-so-new breed of man. Typically, he’ll have a few spoilt, cranky kids in tow, and a papoose strapped to a sunken chest. He’ll be laboring to make the outing to Trader Joe’s a “learning experience” for the brats—one that every other store patron is forced to endure. This generic guy oozes psychological correctness and zero manliness. He’s not necessarily effeminate, mind you. Rather, he’s safely androgynous, and most certainly not guy-like in the traditional sense. As personalities go, he and the wife are indistinguishable.

I’ve often wondered whether decades of emasculation—legal and cultural—have bred these men. It would seem my hunch may have more merit than I imagined. On Halloween, Dr. Thomas Travison and colleagues at the New England Research Institutes in Watertown, Mass., released this hormonal horror story: American men are indeed losing the stuff that makes them macho.

“A new study has found a ‘substantial’ drop in U.S. men’s testosterone levels since the 1980s.” The average levels of the male hormone have been dropping by an astounding 1 percent a year. A 65-year-old in 1987 would have had testosterone levels 15 percent higher than those of a 65-year-old in 2002. Aging, slouched, pony-tailed hippies, everywhere apparent, look more flaccid, because they are more flaccid.

The reasons for the reduction in testosterone levels remain unclear. A rise in obesity and a decline in smoking have been suggested, since “testosterone levels are lower among overweight people and smoking increases testosterone levels.” The Marlboro Man was certainly manly and fit-looking. Other researchers have implicated estrogen-mimicking chemicals, ubiquitous in the environment.

Conspicuously absent from the report are changes in life experiences over time. These trends are, however, routinely referenced when discussing incidence of this or the other disease or deficiency in women. Breast cancer is said to be associated with the modern woman’s propensity to delay or forfeit childbearing. Osteoporosis is exacerbated by women’s sedentary routines—they do less weight-bearing work than they used to (although, as Borat attests, in Kazakhstan, women still do plenty plowing).

Boyhood today, for example, means BB guns and “bang-bang you’re dead” are banned. Tykes are required to hack their way through a page-turner like One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads. The smashing success of politically incorrect books such as The Dangerous Book for Boys proves how desperate little boys are to be boys again—the book reintroduces a new generation of youngsters to the joys of catapult-making, knot-tying, stone skimming, astronomy, and much more. (Concocting rocket fuel from saltpeter and sugar is not in the book, but is a lot of fun—or so my husband tells me.)

Boys are hardwired for competition; the contemporary school enforces cooperation. Boys like to stand out. But team-work obsessed, mediocre, mostly female school teachers teach them to fade into the crowd. Boys thrive in more disciplined, structured learning environments; the American school system is synonymous with letting it all hang out.

Sons are more likely to be raised without male mentors, since moms, in the last few decades, are more inclined to divorce (and get custody), never marry, or bear children out of wedlock. The schools have been emptied of manly men and staffed by feminists, mostly lacking in the Y chromosome. Although boys (and girls) require discipline, the rare disciplinarian risks litigation.

Then there are the effects of years of Ritalin. Teachers prefer girls (many narcissistic, feral, female “pedagogues” have even taken to sexually preying on boys). To make boys more like girls, they’ll often insist that they be plied with “Kiddie Cocaine.” Children as young as two are being medicated with a substance whose side effects include liver damage, cardiac arrhythmia, and death. Writing for the PBS’s “Frontline,” Dr. Lawrence Diller, who favors Ritalin, cautions that “despite sixty years of stimulant use with children…some as-yet-undiscovered negative effect of Ritalin still could be found.” (Hampered hormonal levels later in life, perhaps?)

When boys leave secondary school, they discover that society privileges girls in tertiary schools and in the workplace. Why, even girls favor girls. Most swoon over the washed-out, asexual anchor, Anderson Cooper. In TV newsrooms, cherubic-looking, soft-spoken, “girlie-men,” such as Bill Hemmer and Don Lemon, are replacing deep-voiced, macho men. Tom Brokaw, for instance.

Women say they look for partners who are “sweet and sensitive.” If they’re having children with men who grow bum-fluff for stubble, then perhaps they’re breeding out testosterone.

Is it at all possible that the feminization of society over the past 20 to 30 years is changing males, body and mind? Could the subliminal stress involved in sublimating one’s essential nature be producing less manly men?

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is a delicate homeostatic feedback system, intricately involved in regulating hormones and stress. Has it become the axis of evil in the war on men? Just asking…

November 2

*Image/screen picture credit

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ADHD: Unresearched Diagnoses Vulnerable To Misuse

Ilana Mercer — Thu, 13 Jan 2000 19:59:16 +0000

The love and concern for our children is one of the most powerful things in the lives of parents. We want them to succeed in what is an increasingly competitive world. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) touches on our fears and aspirations for our children. It also puts to the test the manner in which we accept their imperfections and the effect of those imperfections on us. This is why understandably the topic of ADHD causes such distress to parents.

When I queried this catch-all diagnosis, giving voice, incidentally, to a robust and ongoing debate underway in the scientific community, readers objected. I was accused of neglecting to do “research,” although talking to ADHD stakeholders was usually how readers defined research. Let me say that while the human story is emotionally powerful and makes for good copy, in isolation, it is an anecdote with little research validity beyond that of a case study. I would hope, however, that people use their critical faculties to question orthodoxy. Arguments must ultimately be judged on their merit, not by the authority or the qualifications of those who make them.

In 1997, Robert Sternberg, a prominent Yale professor of psychology told The New Republic magazine there was no medical evidence to support the view that children who are labeled learning-disabled have an immutable neurological disability in learning. A year later the flagship American National Institutes of Health (NIH), confirmed his pronouncement. In a Consensus Statement on the Diagnosis and Treatment of ADHD, prepared by a non-advocate, non-Federal panel of experts, the NIH cautioned that there exists “no independent valid test” for ADHD, adding that “further research is necessary to establish ADHD as a brain disorder”. This paper offers a distillation of the relevant research to date in the field.

There are persistent concerns in the research and clinical communities regarding the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) from which the ADHD and many other fashionable diagnoses are culled. The latest critical examination of the manual is entitled Making Us Crazy DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorder.

Written by two American academics, it received a nod from no less than the august British Times Literary Supplement (TLS), whose reviewer ventured that the DSM is an American invention, unique to that culture. The DSM, wrote American reviewer and social psychologist Carol Tavris, represents a “brilliant orchestration of pseudo-science, marketing and promotion,” which has “succeeded in transforming the normal difficulties of life into mental disorders.”

The book points not only to the shabbiness of scientific evidence inherent in the DSM, but to the hundreds of diagnoses created which are vulnerable to misuse. Conditions like “Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” or “Conduct Disorder” harbor Orwellian possibilities. Such diagnoses were likely the bailiwick of the mental health professionals in the former Soviet Union, when they needed to dispose of dissidents.

For real double-bind value, look no further than a DSM condition called “Non-Compliance with Treatment.” Disagree with the medical demiurge, and he slaps you with a diagnosis. Safer not to risk that second opinion. Not only are “most of the DSM labels circular,” avers the TLS reviewer, but they “confuse labels with explanations”. Ultimately, they aim to give the public a psychiatric explanation for the pain in their lives, and hope that a pill can eradicate it.

There are now approximately 5-6 million children on Ritalin in North America, up from 1 million in 1990. Most of the children being medicated are boys, with minority boys 11 times more likely to be on this stimulant. Ninety percent of Ritalin, which is supposed to help children focus, is marketed in the US. One can’t help but wonder why American and Canadian children don’t score very well on international scholastic tests. Maybe there isn’t enough Ritalin going around? On the other hand, maybe the schools are failing children. Either way, it doesn’t really matter: As long as Ritalin is making kids happier, who cares? Certainly not the pharmaceutical companies who are making merry with between $30 to $60 a month per medicated child.

By masking the pain of living with a pill, mental health professionals are abnegating their responsibility and traditional mandate to explore and improve the many psycho-social factors that influence a life. In the process, vital interventions are overlooked, and we whittle down control over and responsibility for our lives to the inaction and resignation inherent in a biological determinism.

Finally, by allowing emotional life to be homogenized through pharmacology, we are passing up on what it means to be human.

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