Hildegarde

Lyamaree saysL

>>>In other news, I too was really puzzled by Jane’s description of teachers, nurses and social workers as not “everyday people.”  To me, it doesn’t get more everyday than those professions. Trust me, it’s not those people keeping the theraputic culture going, as they benefit from it no more than anyone else subjected to it, and may suffer more than the rest of us. It’s not so much the teacher who wants to deal with medicated students, it’s the administrator who ends up with troublesome kids in their office.  Sure, some teachers may see medicating students as an easy way to to an obedient class, but most of them do not. Layers of professionals are required to deal with testing, diagnosing and treating so-called ADD or ADHD kids, and they’re the ones who are directly benefiting from keeping that theraputic meme going.

If nurses spend more time dealing with fake “syndromes” they have less time to do real nursing. And there is no shortage of work for nurses, it’s not like they’re creating work to keep themselves busy. But therapists, mental health professionals, people who run addiction treatment programs (which as Jane points out essentially don’t work) and talk show hosts sure do benefit from keeping us all on the edge of “addiction” to something, real or not.
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I quoted that whole thing because it makes a bunch of assumptions I want to address.

First, when I said “ordinary people” I meant “people without a professional connection,” and I  should have been more specific.

But the simple fact is this: all the categories of people I mentioned are required to go through state and often federally mandated training of specific kinds related to things like ADHD, child abuse and neglect, and addiction, and all of it is firmly anchored in the assumptions of the therapeutic culture.

Such therapeutic assumptions are now the very definition of “good social work practice,” and the training given to social workers–as well as that given to  people with degrees in “educational psychology”–is unlikely to even indicate that some of these assumptions are factually challenged or have no real scientific basis. 

Teachers and nurses, on the other hand, get their training in this sort of thing largely from “workshops” required to teach them to recognize “red flags” for various “problems,” and if you looked at the checklist given by the CDC for ADHD, you can tell that those checklists are broad, often described behavior you and I would consider perfectly normal, and vague enough to make a “diagnosis” possible with the least indication of any actual abnormality.

Referrals for ADHD almost always come from teachers, who are encouraged to see sending the kid to the school psychologist for a Ritalin prescription (or referral to a specialist for a Ritalin prescription) as “helping” a child “at risk” for God only knows what.

As to nurses–nurses in hospitals may indeed be too busy to bother with most of these things, but nurses in school are not.   In fact, they often have very little to do on a day to day basis.  Being the point person for discovering children “at risk” and funnelling them into “counseling” so that they “get help” for their “problems” makes the job a lot more interesting, and can lead to a significant power base that would be otherwise inaccessible to someone in that position.

The will to power, and need to fuel a fantasy of oneself as the Brave Heroic Crusader who Helps Children, are both motivations I don’t think most of you take seriously enough, but they may indicate why all–absolutely all–the truly awful cases of this sort of thing I’ve run across, the ones that resulted in monumental lawsuits, where parents were threatened with the loss of their children if they didn’t agree to Ritalin prescriptions or to having that child branded psychotic and placed on psychotropic drugs and in a “program”–absolutely all of them started with school nurses.

And I’ve beenlooking up these cases for months now.  What scares me is that there are probably a lot more of them, where the parents didn’t know enough to know they could fight, or where the parents found not fighting convenient, or where the parents had bought into the therapeutic culture themselves and therefore bought “diagnoses” that were completely cracked and damaging to the child.

Adults, of course, can do a lot more for themselves, and there is SCOTUS precedent that says they cannot be treated against their wills.  Children have no such protections.

But if the therapeutic culture was just a matter of big drug abuse programs and companies that made psychotropic drugs, we’d have a lot less of it and it wouldn’t be impingingon our lives so much. 

And it is impinging on our lives, whether we realize it consciously or not.