"Brain Dysfunction" is Only in the USA

Not surprisingly, the use of Ritalin in the United States has increased by more than 700 percent since 1990, as more than six million children between the ages of 3 and 18 have been labeled mentally ill and medicated with the psychotropic drug.  No other country in the world diagnoses its children with mental illness in this way.  Only American children appear to be suffering from an epidemic of “brain dysfunction” that has not yet begun to affect the children of Europe or Asia or Africa.  Today, more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of Ritalin is being used on American children. … 

In addition to Ritalin, there has been an increase in the use of other psychotropic drugs on children.  Between 1995 and 1999, stimulant drug use went up 23 percent.  The use of Prozac-like drugs for children under 18 went up 74 percent; in the 7-12 age group it rose 151 percent; for children under 6 it climbed up an astonishing 580 percent.  For children under 18 the use of mood stabilizers is up 4,000 percent and the use of new antipsychotic medications such as Risperdal has grown nearly 300 percent. . . .

A diagnosis of a brain dysfunction, moreover, removes any responsibility for the child’s behavior from the parents.  It is not their fault that their child is unhappy, is doing poorly in school, and cannot sit still in class; it is the child’s faulty brain function.  And so parents embrace a chemical shortcut to the behavior modification that in the past was recognized as a family duty.

Anne Hendershott, The Politics of Deviance, p. 51, 52