As Huxley feared, we’ve rejected John Stuart Mill’s “better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” So how’s it working for you, to quote Dr. Phil. It doesn’t seem to be working for children, massively anxious and massively drugged.
We are medicalizing normal life and it’s not going well. Including treating being male as a pathology to be cured with whatever SOMA equivalent is currently trendy.
Peterson’s comment, and if you like experts he’s a licensed psychologist the College of Psychologists of Ontario is cancelling for unwoke views, is “This happens all the time. Idiot teachers and therapists mistake youth for pathology. How could we get stupider?”
I do not think he should have asked that question because many people will take it as a challenge. Especially the “experts say” types in media stories whose prevailing stupidity is already to treat children like adults and vice versa, letting the former mutilate their sex organs while the latter can’t watch cigarette ads. But in at least one respect we treat kids like adults: If they’re unhappy we drug them.
Already in 2013 the Ottawa Citizen wrote, “Canadian researchers are warning of an alarming and ‘exponential’ rise in prescribing antipsychotic drugs to children.” But if we were alarmed we took a chill pill. Literally. As Maclean’s noted back in 2005, “Last year, Canadians filled over 45 million prescriptions for psychotropic medications – a 40 per cent increase over 2000.” With just 32 million of us then, it was nearly 1.5 prescriptions each.
I thought it was a lot. But apparently I’m weird. I hope you are too.
In 2014 Sharon Kirkey, a Postmedia reporter vigilant on this file, started a story, “One of Canada’s top psychiatrists believes too many Canadians are treating life’s normal spells of misery the way they would handle something they dislike about their bodies: By asking a doctor to make their lives better.” Frankly the first response to disliking something about your body should be gratitude at having one at all, followed by a trip to the gym. But the main point is, as psychiatrist and pundit Theodore Dalrymple wrote in National Review 21 years ago, “I very rarely see a patient who is in a dreadful personal situation, in which it is inconceivable that he or she should be happy, who has not been prescribed these drugs.”
He added pointedly, “they have been issued a promissory note that is false, almost fraudulent.” Instead of tackling their problems, from addiction to domestic abuse to bad philosophy, the patient “is only too glad to hand the responsibility over, for he does not want to change his way of life” while the doctor wants to feel helpful, wants the fee, and wants them out of the waiting room.
Good heavens. We’re not that kind of people, are we? Surely, as Miranda said right before “brave new world,” “How beauteous mankind is!” And if not, there’s plastic surgery, or a pill to make us feel beautiful. But there’s also a vital maxim that parents should worry less that their kids don’t always listen to them and more that they do always watch them.
If your child is unhappy, maybe it’s because we’ve built a scary, chaotic, and amoral new world. If they can’t sleep, maybe they and we need “cognitive behavioural therapy,” materialist babble for learning self-control, a.k.a. building character, while exploring philosophical questions. I grant that modern philosophy is unlikely to help. But rediscovering eternal verities would. Nobody said it would be easy. But many claim it works.
Instead we spurn self-improvement for self-medication, and drug the kids along with us. O weird new world.
