UNRULY children behave properly within minutes of swallowing it. Books, lawsuits and websites have been mobilised in honour or horror of its name. But Ritalin is more than just a noisily debated treatment for young hyperactive brains. Increasingly, it is being held aloft as a grim warning of where the new biomedical sciences are leading us.
Take the latest call for a tighter rein on such research. In Our Posthuman Future, Francis Fukuyama rates the galloping pace of neuropharmacology and the brain sciences as even more threatening to human dignity and freedom than the prospect of designer babies. 鈥淰irtually everything that the popular imagination envisions genetic engineering accomplishing is much more likely to be accomplished sooner through neuropharmacology,鈥� he writes. And for a taste of the kind of 鈥渕ind engineering鈥� that might flow from this, he suggests we look at the impact of Ritalin.
Clearly there are worries with this pill and its long-term effects on the brain. What Ritalin has never been, however, is a high-tech product of the new biomedical sciences. The suggestion that it is overlooks its true history and the real lessons it holds.
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Chemists first synthesised Ritalin, or methylphenidate, in Switzerland in 1944, and the first clinical trials using it to treat hyperactivity ran some four decades ago. Far from being a precise clinical tool, it interferes messily with the brain鈥檚 chemistry. It is the product of old-fashioned suck-it-and-see science. To this day, nobody is exactly sure how it works.
So how did it get to be the pin-up pill for a scary new age of revolutionary neuroscience? Like Monty Python鈥檚 hapless Brian, this run-of-the-mill amphetamine acquired its reputation only because it caught the eye of an expectant crowd. Demand for Ritalin took off in the early 1990s, a time of much breathless talk about neuroscience.
快猫短视频s were starting to expose the genetic and biochemical roots of human personality, supposedly turning the mind into a machine ripe for fixing. Yet real examples of high-tech mind engineering were scarce, so when commentators needed evidence of the revolution they held up Ritalin, endowing it with a more sophisticated image than it deserved.
But what triggered the soaring demand? As psychiatrist David Healy points out in The Creation of Psychopharmacology: 鈥淭he psychiatric treatment of young children with drugs had until the 1990s been all but taboo鈥ass treatment on the scale that developed by the mid-1990s indicates a profound cultural shift.鈥� The rebranding of hyperactive behaviour as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) in the 1980s helped create that shift, as did a huge marketing effort by Ritalin鈥檚 manufacturer. But neither could have succeeded if doctors and patients weren鈥檛 themselves becoming more open to viewing problem behaviour as an abnormality serious enough to be fixed through drugs.
The roots of this change have been widely debated. One favourite suggestion is that harried parents and teachers prefer to blame brain chemistry rather than bad parenting or teaching for their charges鈥� troublesome behaviour. But there are other, less obvious factors. One is the development of psychological rating scales for measuring mood, behaviour and personality. Healy argues that just as the spread of bathroom scales in the 1960s laid the ground for anorexia nervosa, so the arrival of psychological checklists did the same for conditions such as ADHD. Without them, drugs manufacturers would struggle to design trials, and to identify children who deviate sufficiently from behavioural norms to require treatment.
But merely measuring and naming a behavioural deviation cannot spark a giant epidemic. What else was going on? It is probably true that before Ritalin took off, a lot of damaging hyperactivity was overlooked. It might even be true that hyperactive behaviour is increasing. But no psycho-medical condition spreads as fast as prescriptions for Ritalin have in the past decade. If hyperactivity is now diagnosed so often it is because it matters more to parents and teachers than it did.
Which isn鈥檛 surprising. In today鈥檚 super-competitive and super-protective world, childhood is not what it was. The idea has quietly taken hold that we鈥檙e all prisoners of our early years. Children鈥檚 behaviour, what they learn and when they learn it have taken on unprecedented significance. What was once a fluid time of discovery has been reinvented by cognitive psychologists as a succession of neural phases for learning language, social skills, number concepts and the rest. Grab these chances and your child prospers; miss them and supple synapses might ossify. Poisoning young minds with bad experiences is seen as a sure-fire recipe for a blighted life. Childhood has become something that has to be normal and got right 鈥� even if, paradoxically, that means using psychiatric drugs.
Drugs and technologies are not simply dumped into our laps by scheming scientists. They emerge because of a complex web of forces. If we want to control their impact, we ignore this web at our peril.