Beacon Broadside

Today’s post is from Chris Mercogliano, author of In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids’ Inner Wildness. He has been a teacher at the Albany Free School since 1973 and co-director since 1985. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, and he is also the author of Making It Up As We Go Along, and Teaching the Restless: One School’s Remarkable No-Ritalin Approach to Helping Children Learn and Succeed.

Michael Phelps didn’t need drugs to ‘fly into Olympic history. And at the tender age of 11 he decided he didn’t need them to negotiate his way through school.

Growing up in what by several accounts was an authoritarian household—his father was a state trooper and in an interview in the New York Times
his mother describes herself as "stern"—Michael was diagnosed ADHD at age 9. His parents’ on- again, off-again relationship had finally ended in divorce two years earlier, and his teachers had been complaining since kindergarten that he was restless, talkative, and easily distracted in class. These, of course, are all classic "symptoms" of a supposedly genetic neurochemical imbalance in the brain, and so a pediatrician suggested to Michael’s mom that she put him on Ritalin.

According to Mrs. Phelps, Ritalin marginally improved her son’s school performance and dulled him into peacefully doing the minimum on his nightly homework assignments. But he felt stigmatized by having to go to the nurse’s office at lunchtime to swallow a pill every day, and after two years Michael pleaded to be taken off the drug. "I don’t want to do this anymore, Mom. My buddies don’t do it. I can do this on my own." Fortunately for Michael, his mother believed in him deeply and so she listened.

The rest, as they say, is history. At 15, Michael became the
youngest American swimmer to compete in the Olympics in 68 years. He
finished fifth in the 200-meter butterfly, had his first world record
at 16, and now he is the most decorated athlete in Olympic history.

As for Mrs. Phelps, she has been hired by Ortho-McNeil-Janssen, the
manufacturer of the popular ADHD medication Concerta, as a "celebrity
mom" who will be available to answer questions on a company-sponsored
Website about her experiences with ADHD. All of this despite the fact
that her son never took this particular drug, and, as we just learned,
that he rejected its pharmaceutical cousin because it made him feel so
badly about himself.

In her most recent post on a drug company-sponsored Facebook community,
Mrs. Phelps starts off with some excellent advice for parents of
children struggling to fit in in conventional schools. She recommends
talking to the child’s teacher about creating the optimal classroom
environment; communicating frequently with the teacher outside of the
usual format of report cards and parent/teacher conferences;
facilitating increased social interactions outside of school; and
encouraging challenging and meaningful extracurricular activities like
sports, clubs, and volunteering in the community. She also advocates
for providing healthy food and even getting kids to participate in its
preparation.

I might add parenthetically that when the editor of my book, Teaching the Restless,
did the above, her second-grade-son no longer needed the Ritalin he had
begun taking the previous year and went on to have a successful
experience in the Boston public schools.

Perhaps indicating a nagging ambivalence, it isn’t until midway
through her Facebook post that Mrs. Phelps drops the other shoe and
slides into the drug company party line that all parents of "ADHD kids"
should follow the National Institutes of Health (NIH) guidelines
and "treat" their children with one or more biopsychiatric drugs and a
Skinnerian program of checklists and continual rewards for compliant
behavior.

Then, immediately following the post there is an "interview" with
Ortho-McNeil-Janssen’s "expert-in-residence" Patricia Quinn, MD, a
pediatrician and mother of four, three of whom are diagnosed with ADHD.
Unlike Mrs. Phelps, Dr. Quinn cuts straight to the NIH chase: ADHD is
an incurable neurological disorder that one can only hope to control
with biopsychiatric drugs and behavior mod. Toward the end of the
interview she also mentions in passing the additional option of
parenting skills training to teach parents techniques for managing
their child’s behavior. Never, however, does she make any of the
suggestions to parents that Mrs. Phelps began her blog post with.

Parenthetical note #2: In November, 1998, NIH held a Consensus Development Conference on ADHD and Its Treatment
in order to clear away once and for all the doubts and uncertainties
that have continued to cloud the issue. Consensus Conferences are
convened in order for experts to present scientific data about
controversial treatments to an independent jury, which, after hearing
the evidence, writes a final consensus statement. The fact that,
historically, NIH-funded research has always had a decidedly pro-ADHD
bias, and that the presenting experts were all selected by Dr. Peter Jensen,
an increasingly staunch defender of biopsychiatric approaches to
dealing with non-conforming children, makes the conclusions reached by
the jury surprising indeed. After raising fundamental questions about
whether ADHD is a valid diagnosis, the jury also admitted the failure
of researchers to produce enough data to indicate that ADHD is due to
brain malfunction. Their consensus statement ends with a deadening
thud: "Finally, after years of clinical research and experience with
ADHD, our knowledge about the cause or causes of ADHD remains
speculative. Consequently, we have no strategies for its prevention."

That Dr. Quinn is able preach the ADHD gospel without so much as a
hiccup brings me to a third and final parenthetical note. In 1987 a
group of parents of children diagnosed with ADHD and two treating
psychologists near Miami, Florida, founded what on the surface appeared
to be a non-profit advocacy and support organization called Children
and Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD). What
most people don’t know is that CHADD is almost entirely funded by
Novartis, the manufacturer of Ritalin, which for many years was the
only drug prescribed for the treatment of ADHD, and that its primary
function is to lobby both the general public and various drug
regulatory agencies on Novartis’s behalf.

The moral of this convoluted tale? A couple come readily to mind,
one being the inspiring story of a young man who overcame troubling
family circumstances and a school environment that didn’t suit his
high-energy, physical nature, found something he passionately loves to
do, and then excelled at it beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The second
is a far darker one, of a pharmaceutical industry that pretends to be
selling children’s medicine, masks itself in many forms, and stops at
nothing to ply its wares to an unsuspecting clientele.

Here’s hoping that Michael Phelps’s incredible transcendence will
somehow escape the drug company’s clutches, just the way he managed to
outswim their drugs.

You might also be interested in Chris Mercogliano’s previous posts on Oppositional Defiant Disorder and how to get kids to love reading, and Mark Hyman’s Beacon Broadside post about Debbie Phelps.