Perry Writes:
Most people would have no particular urge to stop a child with diabetes from taking her insulin. Your friend seems to have the sick idea that they know better than the child's parents whether the child should be taking their meds or not, simply because the medication is for a "mental" problem. This isn't your friend's child. Its someone else's child. They have no right to make such decisions.
Since diabetes has an organic cause, this analogy with syndromes and disorders defined solely by behavioral percentages fails. A better model might be height, which follows a basically continuous distribution once outliers due to functional endocrine problems are eliminated. We could, of course, define a "vertical deficit disorder" (VDD) which 10% of the population have by definition, and for which the treatment would be synthetic human growth hormone given regularly during the growing years. People with VDD would probably want to be taller, and be as successful as their peers at important things like basketball. The specified treatment would certainly demonstrate effectiveness in accomplishing this goal. People with VDD would argue that their disease was real, since it was hereditary, and could be measured with complex scientific instrumentation, like PET^H^H^HYardsticks. Nonetheless, reputable scientists usually only perscribe HGH for persons many standard deviations away from the norm, or who have medical disorders which interfere with normal production of the substance. Any doctor who started handing out perscriptions to everyone in the shortest 10% of the population would probably be up on malpractice charges posthaste. Amphetamines have demonstrated themselves to be a tricky medication even for psychological disorders for which they were once considered appropriate. ADD and its treatment plays very well into a society that seems to feel that each and every one of life's misfortunes must be given a name and called a disease. Of course, no amount of reason will disuade the True Believers from embracing yet another disease model, and we shouldn't expect that it would. But I think it is clear to many people that the forced medication of children for the convenience of those who take care of them is getting a bit out of control.