If it wasn’t bad enough that our Soma, Prozac and other antithetic depressive derivatives were heralded as purely mythical in their efficacy; it seems now Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder has metamorphosed into the new Bi-polar Disorder and children as young as two are in the line of sight for frontier psychiatry. Tonight’s Cutting Edge on SBS aired this disturbing trend in medicalising childhood. I don’t know if I ought to laugh or cry at the outlandish hypothesis that children can be effectively diagnosed with such illnesses and to medicate what may very well be normal behaviour seems to be a recipe for disaster. The whole proposition seems counter intuitive and perhaps even ludicrous but that could just be due to my ignorance or bias. I am concerned that the parents in the program were being led into some experimental psychiatry that was beyond their comprehension and that perhaps their own ignorances and fancies of normalcy were influencing their consent in participation of this experiment. Of course it is easy for me to make armchair commentary without really having any experiential reality in parenting or having to deal with difficult children. But still, pumping psychotropic drugs into the mouths of babes seems like an overly extreme way of dealing with the problem.

The questions which arise in my armchair analysis or popcorn gallery perspective are:

• In what way do we judge normalcy and acceptable behaviours?
• How can we judge the moods of children and how do we reconcile deviation from a perceived norm?
• In what way does our own sense of normalcy, thoughts and actions impact upon our children?
• Are we looking for a magic wand?
• Does modern living effect children’s behaviour in detrimental ways ?
• What motivations are involved in the therapeutic and medical community?
• Does every nuance and deviation from the norm need to be medicalised?

In my opinion it is a dangerous road that is being embarked upon when every part of human existence is a symptom of disease, when behaviour is increasingly being managed by pharmaceuticals it seems to me that we are placing an extraordinary amount of power into the arms of business and inevitably Government. Are we effectively allowing a society to become a “Brave New World” where homogeneity is the desired model for society and any deviation from the perfected norm is cast away?