Missing Link

I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend over the past few years. Parents, unable to discipline their children (unable or unwilling, I think it’s a combination), are turning to doctors and prescribed medicine to provide a drug-induced cooperation from their kids. If a child acts up, spanking and other corporal punishment is no longer acceptable (lest you be charged with child abuse), instead we feed them carefully prepared chemicals in the hopes that it will calm them down and make them more respectful. And it does work, but for all of the wrong reasons. I know this, from personal experience (though, to be quite fair, my circumstances should not reflect poorly on my parents. Medicating me was NOT their idea, nor was it their idea to take me to a doctor in the first place). Let me explain.

Shortly before high school, I think it was around 7th grade, I wrote a short story for a creative writing assignment. I was told to write about ANYTHING I wanted, and so I wrote a backstory explaining a cut-scene from a game I had finished playing, DOOM. In particular, the cut scene showed a rabbits head on a stake. I wrote a story about how it was my rabbit, and some evil beings came and stole it and killed it. The focus of the story was more on my relationship with the rabbit, and only the very end dealt with how it ended up on a stake (and how sad I was because of it). I thought it was well written, and I’m sure had I been older it would have been received much better. The school was not amused, and called my parents insisting that I recieve psychological counseling. And so it began.

A doctor, Dr. Kinder, was recommended to my parents from somewhere, I honestly don’t know where. He was a psychologist, but there was a psychiatrist in his office who could prescribe medication. After doing some tests, and talking with me a few times, he decided I was depressed, and that I had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). I was put on prozac (I think it was prozac at first, If not it was something similar, and prozac was introduced later), and ritalin. By now I was in 8th grade, and it seemed to work, as I was getting homework completed and turned in and my teachers were happy. I think this had less to do with the medication and a lot more to do with me doing what I needed to do in the hopes that it’d get me off the drugs. It didn’t. Instead, it strengthened the case that I had ADD, and that drugs were neccesary. Flash forward to high school.

In High School, I was a nobody. Literally. I started at a preparatory school, Brebeuf Jesuit. I was on the football team, but very few people there accepted me (there were a few that did, but a lot more that didn’t). I wasn’t accepted as a “Jock”, I wasn’t a “Prep” and I didn’t fit in with any other groups there either, I wasn’t “goth” or “punk”, nor was I really a nerd. I was a drifter, and loner. By all indications, I should have been one of those kids who brings a gun to school and shoots everyone down. I didn’t, in fact the thought never crossed my mind. Throughout all of that time, though, I really did become depressed. No matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to fit in anywhere. I had a few friends (and some who turned out not to be friends at all in the end), but even that didn’t seem to help much. Throughout all of this, I was still on medication, and the dosages were only being increased.

Finally, around thanksgiving time of my sophmore year, my mom picked me up from school and took me to an appointment with Dr Kinder. I was happy and upbeat when my mom picked me up, something both she remembers and I remember. I’d had a good day at school, which was rare enough at the time to have remembered it. After about 5 minutes of talking to Dr. Kinder, he’d managed to get me to completely break down. To this day I don’t remember what he said, or what he did to get me to crack. He then brought my mom back, and told her that I needed to be hospitalized. An hour and a half later, I was being admitted to the psych ward of a hospital, wondering to myself how the hell I had wound up there. I was kept there for a week. I couldn’t eat without permission, sleep without permission, pee without permission (and a guard to make sure I didn’t harm myself), shower without permission (and a guard to make sure I didn’t harm myself). I was, in short, imprisoned very much against my will. I don’t blame my parents for this, they were listening to what the doctor told them, and assumed that he knew what he was talking about and what he was doing.

The psychiatrists there at the hospital had one on one meetings with patients, as you’d expect. I was a young and somewhat rebelious teen at the time, and so I took it upon myself to spout out a story about how I had this great idea for a computer virus, where it mimics the flu or a common cold and morphs and mutates to evade detection and elimination. They thought I was completely nuts! ( on a side note, I was talking with Matt, my boss and mentor when I was a security engineer for Infotex, about this a few weeks ago, and he said that my idea was actually a pretty smart one, so take that you shrinks!) After a few such meetings, my doctor ordered a full blown psychiatric evaluation (you know, where they do the ink blot tests and stuff). I’m not sure what the results of that were, they never would tell me. I was made aware that they were putting me on Risperdol. Risperdol is a very nasty drug, an atypical anti-psychotic drug, sometimes used to treat delusional disorders. That would have been OK, had I actually been delusional. I wasn’t, though, and so I found myself a kid who really didn’t need to be medicated at all, on some form of ritalin (actually by this point I had switched to a different drug. Ritalin made me angry and irritated), prozac and risperdol. That’s some SERIOUS medication.

I really can’t tell you much about life after that for a few years. I was medicated to the point of not feeling anything. I wasn’t sad or otherwise upset, and I wasn’t depressed. I wasn’t happy, either. I just was. I existed. I ate, slept, went to school and came home. What little joy I was able to feel came mostly through playing computer games. I rarely went out with friends, as I didn’t really have any to go out with. After my second semester of my sophmore year, I left Brebeuf and enrolled in Covenant Christian High School. It was while there, that things started to change for me. First of all, I met my best friend Ben there. That was really the first time I had made a new friend in a long time, and it managed to crack through some of the shell I had constructed around myself. Not long after, I switched doctors to Dr. Couvillon.

I liked Dr. Couvillon. After the first time he talked to me, he told me and my parents that I didn’t need to be on medication a all, and the process was started to gradually wean me off of them. It wasn’t until they took me off the Risperdol that things really changed. (The risperdol was the worst to come off of. They stopped it pretty suddenly, and for about a week I couldn’t sleep, at all. Our family physician said it was withdrawl, and that there wasn’t much that could be done as the drug had to work its way out of my system). Once that happened, my teachers started commenting to my parents that I seemed like a new person, that I had a new energy about me and actually showed that I had a personality. I felt better, too. For one, I actually felt things. I Felt happy, and sad. I was finally FREE of the cloud that seemed to forever shield me from feeling anything.

Since then, I’ve led a perfectly “normal” life. I graduated high school, and went to college. I have a degree now, and co-founded a company. I’m certainly not someone who needed medication. What happened to me? My parents made a small mistake, that of taking me to a doctor who saw medication as the solution to every problem. “Your kid won’t do his homework? NO PROBLEM! We’ll give him this medicine and he’ll do it”. I fear for our young kids these days, as our society finds a pill for everything we come closer to a world like that in “Brave New World”.

Parents, listen up: Medicating your children won’t solve all of your problems. In fact, it’s probably pretty rare when medication is genuinely needed. Try other solutions first, and medication last. If your kids are acting up, it’s probably because they want attention that you won’t give them, or because they are bored with school (as I was).

That’s all I’ve got for today. Sorry for the length, it kinda got away from me there.