Sara McGrail

Fries with those double standards sir?

I was in the dog park yesterday with a woman who I’d not met before who had a young staff called Boris. As Boris repeatedly and enthusiastically tried to convince my dog of the advantages of male only friendships – with some success - she explained to me that Boris was “a nightmare” and that she was trying to get her vet to give him “something like Ritalin” as that had done wonders with her son. I asked how old her son was – she said he was 18 now and doing well. He’d had some problems with drugs last year but that was all over now and he was in college doing GCSEs.

This made me think about our desperate search for a psychopharmacological solution to everything. While not for one minute disputing that some parent have great difficulties with some children (maybe that should read ‘most’ and ‘most’!), and that some children experience distress and unhappiness as a result of behaviours and symptoms that we now attribute to the somewhat subjective diagnosis of ADHD, I think as the BBC Panorama programme this week pointed out, we may be getting this out of proportion.
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