Ritalin Nation

Although Richard DeGrandpre's book Ritalin Nation is interesting and worth reading, I have to report I found it enormously irritating as well. His message is simple: treating children's problems with drugs does not get to the heart of the problem; the real problem is our "rapid-fire culture" and "sensory addiction." He ends his book with a set of recommendations for "deliberate living." For example:

On the other hand, I try to avoid visit a shopping mall more than once a year, and I find myself overstimulated and uncomfortable when I am cajoled into going to the mall. At home, our TV uses an indoor aerial, and although I do watch as much TV as many other people, I feel almost no inclination to get access to more TV channels. And of course, my chosen profession is philosophy, which generally involves detailed and slow scrutiny of long-standing puzzles. Philosophy is not a discipline in a hurry. Furthermore, like DeGrandpre, I feel more alienated than average from modern culture. I struggle to understand how people can be so naive in accepting the values that modern corporate culture furnishes us with. I am certainly am predisposed to be sympathetic to his view that people should be more critical of, questioning of, and inquisitive about the options facing them in their lives.

Maybe now you will better understand my reaction to Ritalin Nation. DeGrandpre seems to neglect how powerful and exciting modern culture is, and thus he seems far too negative about the electronic/computer/TV age. He also seems to wholeheartedly endorse an antipsychiatric attitude towards attention deficit hyerperactivity disorder, such as given by Peter Breggin, (although Breggin is not mentioned in the book). Finally, especially in the early chapters of the book, DeGrandpre combines a mixture of alarmist journalism with pretentious pseudo-philosophy. The very idea of seriously claiming that we have become a "Ritalin Nation" smacks of grandiose rhetoric. Cultural analysis is easy to do badly, and almost impossible to do well. DeGrandpre gathers together a patchwork of different social commentators, his own observations of TV, magazines, newspapers, business, and even overheard comments of passers-by, to support his case, but I didnít find his analysis very balanced.

The later chapters on ADHD and Ritalin are more focused and careful. Reading them, one still gets the impression that pharmaceutical companies and psychiatrists have conspired to dupe the American public and that all mental health professionals who use the diagnosis of ADHD are willingly joining the conspiracy. DeGrandpre seems to ignore the fact that many psychiatrists are tentative and open in their thinking about ADHD, and that they often encourage parents and schools to help children without the use of medication. But the work he cites to argue that ADHD is mostly a developmental problem is important and I am very glad that he has highlighted it. The final chapter on deliberate living has the flavor of a new-age self-help book, but its suggestions might indeed be helpful to some.

Overall, DeGrandpre's attempt to reach a wide market by popularizing his ideas (he is a psychology professor at a small liberal arts college in Vermont) seems to ironically backfire. He tries to make his ideas simple and easily digestible at the expense of balance and detail. In writing for a hurried culture, he himself has written in a hurried simplistic manner. I am also curious to know whether other readers of his book shared my experience in reading it; the more I read, the shorter my attention span became for it. By the end, I could only read a few pages at a time before having to put it down again.

I believe that DeGrandpre deserves praise for drawing attention to the issue of Ritalin and its connection with our culture. Many of his arguments are important, and while his claims may not be radically new, he has at least worked to substantiate them more than most psychiatric critics have. Ultimately though, Ritalin Nation is a polemical work, and lacks balance.