If you listen to news media today, they will attempt to fill your fearful mind with the notion that there is a massive drug epidemic in the United States America
Generation Rx is a 2008 documentary about the pharmaceutical prescription drugs that are being overly prescribed to individuals by doctors and physiologists. The documentary all describes how the pharmaceutical companies manufacture and market these drugs in order to make maximum profit. According to the film mind altering drugs are the fastest growing medicine in the world.
As the film progresses, we find that these disorders like ADHD, Autism and Depression (which are very real disorders and conditions) are often being misdiagnosed by doctors and psychologists for a number of reasons. It could be the fact that we have no real consensus on how to properly diagnose these disorders (What’s a Mental Disorder? Even Experts Can’t Agree) or the fact that pharmaceutical companies create incentives for doctors to diagnose individuals with these disorders. Or it could be because the marketing that is done make people believe that there is a pill that can solve all their problems so they actively seek it out. In reality, all of these are things that are causing the number of individuals taking prescription drugs to rise in the United States United States America
The thesis of this film relates to this course in a number of ways, specifically, our discussions of deviant minds. According to the article The Emergence of Hyperactive Adults as Abnormal by Peter Conrad and Deborah Potter, “ADHD’s expansion was, primarily, accomplished by refocusing the diagnosis on inattention, rather than hyperactivity, and stretching the age criteria. This allowed for the inclusion of an entire population of people and their problems that were excluded by the original conception of hyperactive children” (Conrad & Potter, 2000). In Generation Rx we see the same thing being discussed, as pharmaceutical companies find that in order for the product to achieve maximum profit, they would have to expand their business to include children; this led to doctors giving more diagnosis to children for ADHD and Autism. According to the film, 1 in 30 kids between 5-19 are on mind-altering prescription drugs. (THE AUTISM INFORMATION EPIDEMIC).
The thing I found most interesting in Generation Rx was the discussion about children, and what these drugs do to them, and the consequences others endure because of it. For example, 8 out 13 school shooters were taking mind-changing prescription drugs at the time of their crimes. Also, we are dosing children more frequently and earlier in life than ever before. Because of this, their brains do not develop in a normal natural way and therefore, they are more likely to have problems that may require them to seek medical help. Furthermore, what we find is that the individuals responsible for raising a child (i.e. parents, teachers) either do not have the time or the patience to handle kids when they behave “irrationally.” When these children do not fit neatly in the box we socially construct for them, we end up medicating them until they take our orders and fit nice and snug in the box. Articles and blogs such as Are Some ADHD-Labeled Kids Just Young for Their Age and RSA Animate: Changing Education Paradigms discuss the issue of social constructions for children even further than the film does (which is something I would have liked to see the film go into a bit more.)
Finally, a study I would like to see conducted has to do with the education of our children in correlation with how many children are diagnosed with ADHD or Autism. My study would involve looking at children who attend liberal-private schools for their entire education (K-12) and see what percentages of them are diagnosed with ADHD or Autism. My hypothesis is that children, who are not forced to adhere to a hard, specific structure of learning and instead, have a progressive education that moves at their own pace, will have fewer reports of ADHD and Autism.
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