From: spl@pitstop.ucsd.edu (Steve Lamont)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: Re: Drugs in the Classroom  (Was - Re: Re: Creed.)
Date: 2 Oct 92 16:15:22 GMT
Organization: University of Calif., San Diego/Microscopy and Imaging Resource
NNTP-Posting-Host: pitstop.ucsd.edu

In article <1992Oct2.143212.13672@balrog.dseg.ti.com> keith@balrog.dseg.ti.com (Keith A. Schauer) writes:
>We had a story of one child who couldn't handle the class.  Not half a class
>of children with the same problems.  If it was a story about half a class, I
>would tend to agree with you.  But it wasn't.

I have this feeling that we're more or less agreeing with one another
at the tops of our lungs. :-)

My point was this and this only:  as a nation, as a society, as a
community, we tend to look for the easy, quick answer to things and
all too often the answer is, in the words of George Carlin,
"tock-tock, two for the mouth."

I suspect that if Ritalin were available and in common use when I was
a child, bored by the stultifying busy-work and lackluster teaching, I
would have been diagnosed as "hyperactive" or having an "Attention
Deficit Disorder" and doped up to my little eyebrows.  It was odd that
when I had the rare experience of having a teacher that actually
taught the material as if it meant something rather than just a hoop
to jump through on the way, my attention span lengthed by orders of
magnitude and my grades shot up into the stratosphere.

Now, I don't claim to be particularly brilliant -- I don't even claim
to be of average intelligence, that's for others to judge, not me --
but if I was bored and sometimes a little rambunctious, I can imagine
how a child who is truly gifted might act out when faced with an
educational system that really doesn't know what to do with her.

Joey, the kid we're discussing, might be on one tail of the curve or
the other (the curve describing some characteristic of children that
somehow metaphorically quantifies intelligence and attention span --
purely hypothetical and metaphoric -- I know of no such curve,
although it might exist).  Most kids, although bored, might be so well
acculturated to the system that they go along and keep their noses
clean.  Others might not.  Others might ask themselves "why?"

I could cite specific examples but this post is getting long as it is.

>>I have observed a few children over the years, however, and seen what
>>the whole system can do to an energetic, creative, intelligent young
>>mind when it decides that it's "disruptive."
>
>I would be interested in knowing what you consider the 'system'.  Is it a
>school, a classroom, a school system, the parents, society?  

All of the above.  Note that I do not subscribe to any "conspiracy
theory" here.  Just human nature.

>We are talking about a child that has been referred to, and diagnosed by a
>psychiatrist.  I will take a (not any/all) psychiatrist's diagnosis better
>than my own.  Maybe I'm just a lamb on the way to the slaughter ;-)

I think I'd want a second opinion.  At *least* a second opinion before
I started fiddling with brain function using a drug whose mechanisms
are, by the manufacturer's own description, unknown.  [A sidebar note:
this isn't at all uncommon in pharmacology and not necessarily a
negative statement.  We don't really know how aspirin works, either.]

And then I'd look for some other form of treatment before having to
result to Ritalin or any other stimulant (by the way, a good strong
cup of coffee in the morning has been reported to be as useful as
Ritalin in treating hyperactive children -- for some fairly murky
reason, the brain and neurochemistry of these children reacts in a
backwards fashion to stimulants -- that's why you give them to kids
who are hyperactive).

>Would you rather have a society that tried to use drugs to help people, or 
>would you prefer the prior methods of either doing nothing, so some peoples'
>lives were living hell, or locking them up and forgetting about them?

I think I answered this in my last posting but just to clarify:  No,
of course I don't entirely disapprove of the use of drugs/medicines.
If I did, I certainly wouldn't be working where I'm working.  But
that's not the point we're discussing.  The point, as I understand it,
is whether or not we should resort to drugging problem children as a
first, rather than a last resort.

Sometimes people's lives are living hell, even *with* drugs.
Sometimes, people are drugged simply because they're a pain in the ass
to deal with (there are numerous documented cases of just this taking
place in mental hospitals around the country).

When I think about the mis-uses that psychiatry was put to in the
former-Soviet Union, and the abuses, both potential and real, here, I
get just a little nervous and sceptical about the use of drugs to
control problem children.

The answer is just *too* easy.

							spl

-- 
Steve Lamont, SciViGuy -- (619) 534-7968 -- spl@szechuan.ucsd.edu
UCSD Microscopy and Imaging Resource/UCSD Med School/La Jolla, CA 92093-0608
"If you don't think people are this crazy, you need to move to LA!"
                                     - Gary Stollman