Last Friday, I had the opportunity to talk to a big influence on my work: Robert Whitaker. The Pulitzer-nominated journalist is the author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic, books that question the chemical imbalance theory of mental health, as well as the pharmacological approach to anxiety and depression treatment. His work has made a big impact on the book I’m writing on psychedelic therapy. You can listen to (or watch) our conversation here, but I’ll include a snippet of our talk below.
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Derek: I walked a half-mile to school at age six, so I come from quite a different time, even though I'm only 44. If I was growing up now, I would be put on a drug for ADHD, as I was pretty hyper. Yet our prefrontal cortex doesn't fully develop until our twenties. The idea of putting six-year-olds on these drugs is insane.
Bob: This is one of the biggest moral questions of our time: How do we raise our children? The biggest moral question of our time is climate change. If we don't respond to that, we're really screwing future generations. But it is a big question.
We've created a pathologizing environment for them. Why did we do that?
If you go back to the early nineties, the drug companies recognized the adult market for SSRIs was being saturated. Where's the untapped market? Kids.
You had already started to see that with stimulants for ADHD, but what you see post-1980 is market forces: pharmaceutical companies worked with academic psychiatry to start talking about all of these childhood disorders and the need to medicate them.
What I find particularly distressing is that all the data you can find on medicating kids is ultimately negative, even on symptoms, cognitive function, social functioning, and academic achievement. Most frightening of all—since you opened this with ideas of frontal lobe development—all of our animal studies show that these drugs affect brain development.
If you look at the harm done from pathologizing childhood, it's so broad-based. Kids are taught to monitor their own self. If they find themselves sad, that's wrong, that's abnormal. Whereas in the past, you might think, "I'm sad today." You're expected to be happy, and if you're not happy, that's a problem. We've created a situation where kids are primed to think, "something's wrong with me," and parents are primed to think, "something's wrong with my kid."
Going back to moral therapy: Do we ask about the spaces kids inhabit today? You got to walk a half-mile to school. How many kids get to walk to school today? How many kids feel pressure by second grade to start getting good grades because they have to worry about getting into college?
You create a narrative that helps drive people into this "abnormal" category, so they start using these drugs. And we have all this evidence that it isn't benefiting kids.
We've seen rising suicide rates in kids. Then there's the rise in antidepressants, too. Go to college campuses today, the percentage of kids that arrive with a diagnosis and a prescription is 25 to 30 percent. Do you really think 30 percent of our kids are mentally ill?
You've given kids messages that they're abnormal, ill, and compromised, instead of giving them messages of resilience, of how to grow into life. You can't chase happiness. You can chase meaning in life. You can chase doing things that have some meaning to the social good. I can't just try to be happy. Happy visits you when you're engaged in social relationships, meaning, community, that sort of thing.
The pathologizing of kids is taking away the right of every child to become the author of their own life: to make choices, to try things out, to decide what they want to be, and to grapple with their own minds.
After dozens of hours of YouTube research, we came to important conclusions. (Before you freak out—it’s satire.)
I received word last Thursday that Equinox was reopening this week. As much as I wanted to return to group fitness, I have decided not to teach publicly for the time being. As a cancer survivor with a genetic low white blood cell count, it is not the best option at this time.
As I published on Big Think today, we are not through with this pandemic. For the foreseeable future, I will continue offering three yoga classes per week and one monthly workshop online. I hope to return to Equinox as soon as it seems feasible.
I continue to update my EarthRise Yoga playlist every week and, for the Thursday stretch session, I’m always adding to my Greatest Savasana playlist.
Finally, I’ve launched a new podcast with Mattew Remski and Julian Walker.
Conspirituality is a weekly discussion of the intersection between right-wing conspiracy theories and left-wing wellness utopianism.
The proliferation of conspiracy theories during a time when we need reliable information is troubling. Individually, each of us has worked hard to combat disinformation and cultish thinking in wellness culture. Working with Matthew and Julian is gratifying; I look forward to this stage of our collective journey.
I’ll leave you with the first single from an album I can’t stop listening to. I’m a huge fan of Gnawa music, and her sound is just what I need right now.