Starbucks or Adderral?
What types of routines do you pick up to begin your productive day? For most Seattlelites, the omnipresence of coffee shops speaks for itself. The many cups of coffee consumed to keep up with morning meetings and job demands eventually forces many to think how else could focus and sleep deprivation be balanced? Well as long as there is a problem to be solved, a quick fix strategy is usually found.
The new hope for managing a competitive edge while juggling many responsibilities including a social life has come in the form of “miracle” pills. Adderal, Ritalin, and Prozac are a few of the most popular labels of such drugs that have fallen into the hands of those with psychiatric disorders and those wanting a boost in mental strength. Both clinically and self diagnosed patients of these drugs feel more mental control to meet demands of the competitive world of productivity; however, who is in control of individuals if the drugs have become a temporary solution to keeping up with the circuits of productivity? What higher authority is creating the demands and anxiety citizens have to “deal with?”
The improvement of technology to reach beyond “seeing” the body has brought about the visualization of neurochemical transmitters and genes to prove how mood and behavior patterns are stimulated and indicate psychiatric disorders and diseases (Rose 194). This new age in technological advance is a source of comfort on the surface level. By the end of the 1960’s science had an explanation for psychiatric disorders and finding a “cure” was to be the next program to pursue. Disorders and diseases could be easier detected according to assumed behavioral patterns and phenotypes. Early detection can be stressed to improve the lives of children with mental disorders. Both parents and schools could have less compulsive, more focused children to raise and teach. These children are “promised” the equal opportunity to be “normal” to pursue the competitive job market. The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and a number of other organizations for the mentally ill has “embrace[d] a conception of mental disorders as diseases with a genetic component and argue this association will reduce stigma associated with such conditions and lead to effective treatment (Rose 216).”
The surge of usage of psychiatric drugs by college students prepping for their careers to mid aged professionals becoming dependent on Adderal and Prozac have unraveled the side effects and insight to the prosperous underground economy fueled by the selling of prescription drugs. The prevalence of psychiatric drugs for cognitive enhancement has become a “norm” on college campuses and continues to be used as a strategy to “keep up” and some have managed to “stay ahead” with productivity. We do not have time for healthier, natural ways of mental boosters (Talbot 4). The drug enables students to not only write extensively on a particular topic, but also induces another contemporary, but common mental disorder: compulsive obsessiveness disorder, in which one student said he will “organize my entire music library! I’ve seen some people obsessively cleaning their rooms on it (Talbot 3).” Adderal has worked no different from Paxil in becoming the source of the disease itself (Rose 213), in this case another disease.
Is this the individual problem or a societal issue? Everyone in society is caught within the sticky web of industrial production and campaigning whether or not we are aware of it. "Psychiatry have became transformed by its capitalization (Rose 220)," in which medical institutions have more incentive to diagnose anyone with a disease or disorder. Each diagnosis spawns further profit for the economy since pharmaceutical industries, mental hospitals, clinics, and GP Surgeries become agents to refer and contact each other for extended business. It is not only one industry that benefits, although the pharmaceuticals inherently gather more income from supply demands (Rose 221). The “promise” of a drug to “normalize” people must also be created before advertisements about the drug effectiveness could be made public and before physicians and psychiatrists can recommend the specific drug as the “best” treatment. It seems that there is also ways to entangle consumers even if pharmaceutical drugs were proven harmful or ineffective. As Rose puts it, the “ethical shift was actually to increase investment in the education of their potential consumers…a move widely regarded as an attempt to regain public trust after adverse publicity (215).” Can we come to accept public educators on health as part of this vicious web of capitalism if we inherently instill much trust in disease campaigns to keep us “safe?”
Technological advances have so far enabled physicians and the public sphere of commercialism to invade the both the body and the mind. The “attempts to visualize psychiatric disorders in terms of lesions in the brains of dead patients-extracted, sliced, stained, and magnified-were much mocked by psychoanalyst in the early twentieth century (Rose 195).” It seems that we have made it thus far with equipment, but still use psychiatric diagnoses for the medicalization of “deviance” to uphold the “norms of a patriarchal social order (Rose 194).” The function “patriarchal social order” teams up with the commercial industry to coerce citizens to keep up with creating a productive economy. In fact, because commercialization is heavily associated with industries it is very easy to overlook the political bodies that make the practice of commercialization in the medical sector permissible.
Psychiatric drugs have not only been prescribed for childhood disorders, but have been used to control "overactive" inmates (Rose 210). The very idea that the same drugs have been used to coerce prisoners are advertised as a form of control for individuals shows how entangled we are in believing that we could really gain our lives back with "miracle" pills. We are as much imprisoned by "miracle" pills as inmates are, even if we may not be aware of it. Despite not having a definite answer to whether or not these drugs are more effective than harmful to individuals, the sales of psychriatic drugs such as Provigil have increased by 9x from 2002 to 2008 (Talbot 5). Internet chatrooms and college campuses have provided mediums for obtaining popular psychiatric drugs like Adderal. The usage of these drugs by successful businessmen and women only to prove to the general population that these drugs are worth consuming despite consequences of having “zombie-like” numbness, loss of appetite, speaking difficulties, and numerous other side effects that may still need to be discovered.
Sources
Rose, Nikolas. 2007. Neurochemical Selves. IN The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century. Pp 187-223. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Talbot, Margaret. 2009. "Brain Gain: The Underground World of 'Neuroenhancing' Drugs." The New Yorker.
Sources of Images listed in order presented
"Starbucks coffee in hands." 2009. Online Image. Starbucks. 10 July 2009. <http://investor.starbucks.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=99518&p=irol-irhome>.
"Adderral." 2009. Cognitive Enhancing Drugs. Online Image. Sor Bor. 10 July 2009. <http://www.sorbor.com/blog/college/cognitive-enhancing-drugs/>.
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