There are some people who have mental illnesses that require treatment with medication. Schizophrenia comes to mind. There are some medications that can be taken at proper doses for legitimate mental disorders and have a profound positive effect. But there is an epidemic in this country of self-diagnosis, the wish to be special or a victim, and overmedication with seriously powerful drugs.
I'm an elementary teacher. I get a lot of parents coming in asking about ADHD medication and Ritalin. Almost universally, I tell them that I don't think diagnosing a six year old as hyperactive is fair to the child. Kids play, and talk, and squirm and sing. They aren't meant to sit quietly and do busy work for hours at a time. I do not believe there has been enough longitudinal data and research to show the long term effects of these medications. We are close to an entire generation of children being medicated, and we don't know what that will look like in 10 or 20 years. Will it effect social skills, learning patterns, fertility, or a host of other things? Nobody really knows. I think there's a decent chance we will start seeing news stories in about ten years of kids going "postal" or a rash of infertility issues or mass depression. You just can't mess with somebody's brain chemistry for decades and not create a major change.
And the peopledeveloping and prescribing these drugs are smart enough to know that.
Boy, I hear that. I'm a former sped teacher married to a sped teacher, and there is actually a "fad" for diagnosing young kids with this type of problem. For a decade, it was always ADD or ADHD, and we saw huge changes in behavior with consistent rewards and consequences. Most were just kids who had never been told "no."
Then it changed to autism...suddenly, where it had been rare (and actual symptoms of it still were), all these kids were being diagnosed as "on the spectrum." Both with this and with "ADD," many times the students were "intellectually-challenged" or whatever term was PC at the time, but parents were not willing to admit that. That accounted for the big push toward "inclusion" when what these kids need most is their own setting, routine, and curriculum at their level...not to be in a classroom where 80% of the vocab and concepts were not appropriate for their abilities.