Drugs for Boys...is this an outrage?

By Carolyn Abraham, Globe and Mail, October 18, 2010
Figures compiled for The Globe and Mail by IMS Health, an independent firm that tracks pharmaceutical sales, show prescriptions for Ritalin and other amphetamine-like drugs for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder shot up to 2.9 million in 2009, a jump of more than 55 per cent in four years.

More than two million were written specifically for children under 17 – a leap of 43 per cent since 2005 – and at least 75 per cent of them were for young males – a ratio some see as evidence that society is making a malady of boyhood itself.
“What if we were drugging girls at the same rate?” asks Jon Bradley, education professor at McGill University. “What if [the majority] of these prescriptions were being written for girls? There'd be a march.”
If you want a benchmark for the culture of schools, this is one good place to start.
Prescribing drugs mainly to boys continues unabated and with little push back from a public seeking to have their child "conform" to the norms of the school authorities.
Concentration and conformity may not be mutually supportive goals. In fact, as John Steinbeck once wrote, man is most creative and most loyal to his nature in rebellion.
While we are damping down the nervous energies of many boys, we are also, perhaps, creating a compliant client for teachers to control more easily. And one has to wonder if that is a more accurate description of the agenda.
One October, I conducted a workshop for teachers in a small village in which a young boy (12) had died under the wheels of a flatbed during a hayride on Civic Holiday weekend. Some forty plus kids and adults, including his siblings were also on the ride and witnessed the tragedy. Of course we talked about grief, and the implications of such an event. We also talked about empathy and compassion and the rubbing up against each other of the emotions in the community/school and the teaching agenda of the faculty.
At the first break, one teacher approached me seeking a time to talk privately.
When the morning session ended we met in an office in the well-appointed school.
"I teach his ten-year-old brother, and I told him yesterday, the honeymoon is over!" came the words rushing from her lips.
"Let me get this straight; I think I just heard you say that you told this boy's brother, who had witnessed his brother's death a few weeks ago, under the wheels of the flatbed, that 'the honeymoon is over'," I responded. "Is that about right?"
"Well, he is not concentrating and he is not doing his work," she continued.
"And just what honeymoon are you referring to?" I inquired. "His?"
"Oh, my God!" she blurted. "I never actually realized what I was saying when I told him the honeymoon was over. I just wanted and needed control so badly that I stamped on his grief."
"I think you've got a better picture now of the situation," I suggested. "Do you think you have?"
"This might take a little while for him to get over, eh?" she tried.
"Perhaps," I agreed.
The story is certainly not emblematic of or typical background to these prescriptions. There may be many other situations in the lives of their students about which the school administration and the teachers are unaware. However, the attitude of this teacher, focused and driven and conscientious as it was, was precisely not the approach that was going to work.
In fact, focused and driven and conscientious are all adjectives that walk through the classroom door with many teachers. And, while some of these qualities are certainly laudable, there is an optimum level of "drive"mixed with empathy, and just simple "checking in" that brings the current reality of the students' "day" to the awareness of the teacher.
And such "radar" (it has been called intuition, and connection and empathy and vision) is essential to the effective relationship between teacher and student. I can only hope and trust that the teacher in the story above returned to her classroom in a different spirit and attitude from the one in which she began our private conversation.
We now know that research indicates young people prefer texting to phone calls, and one reason is that they control the message, and do not have to engage in a more complicated conversation then they seek.
I remain convinced that the conversation related above would be very different in either phone or texting mode, and perhaps schools will have to take up the challenge of nurturing healthy relationships as a core part of their "unwritten" curriculum.
And such relationships cannot be engendered if the starting point is that one of the two genders in the classroom starts from a problematic posture, in the eyes of the professionals.