The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [52]
But Ciba-Geigy, the company that made Ritalin and doubled its profits in the first half of the 1990s, was hardly the first to cash in on adults’ eagerness for medical solutions to child-rearing problems. Numerous psychiatric hospitals did so, for example, in the 1980s. Over the course of that decade adolescent admissions to private psychiatric hospitals quadrupled, and the number of units catering to children and adolescents increased at least twofold. Fear advertising—lots of it—produced much of the growth. One TV commercial that ran in New York City showed a teenage girl holding a gun to her head. As the screen cut to the hospital’s name and phone number, the sound of a gunshot rang out and parents were urged to call if they worried about their own children. In the Reno, Nevada, newspaper an ad that ran on the day local schools issued grades displayed a report card studded with Fs, beneath which read the foreboding question Is Your Child Failing Life? along with the name and number of a psychiatric facility.69
The ads offered parents relief from their feelings of guilt and impotence by assuring them that there was little they themselves could do apart from hauling their kid to the hospital. Indeed, some ads explicitly ruled out any parental culpability. “Studies indicate that anti-social behaviors in adolescents usually are not ‘reactions’ to home, school or community involvements. They, more often than not, are disorders of neurological development,” read the copy for a psychiatric center in Cerritos, California.70
Parents who responded to these pitches frequently were informed by psychiatrists that their children suffered from illnesses specific to adolescence that go by names like oppositional deficit disorder, conduct disorder, and adjustment reaction. Parents who took the time to look up these ailments in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual discovered that they are little more than fancy pseudonyms for adolescent rebellion—or as the director of a patients’ rights organization put it, “pain-in-the-ass kid.” Based on the DSM, a child qualifies for the label “oppositional deficit disorder” and is a prime candidate for hospitalization if he or she often does any five of the following: argues with adults, defies adults’ requests, does things that annoy others, loses his or her temper, becomes easily annoyed, acts spiteful, blames others for his or her own mistakes, gets angry and resentful, or swears.71
How many of us made it out of adolescence without going through periods in which we acted like that?
Girls had an especially easy time qualifying for hospital admission; they didn’t have to be mean and nasty, just sexually active. The National Association of Private Psychiatric Hospitals published guidelines in 1984 that urged “immediate acute-care hospitalization” for girls guilty of “sexual promiscuity.”72
All told, at least 40 percent of adolescent admissions to private psychiatric hospitals during the 1980s were inappropriate, the Children’s Defense Fund estimated. The hospitals’ advertising campaigns were one reason. When researchers from the University of North Carolina questioned mothers of high school students about their reactions to a dozen fear-based newspaper ads for psychiatric facilities they came up with a paradoxical discovery. The ads had the greatest impact on parents of children who least needed mental health services.73
“Jails for middle-class kids” is how Ira Schwartz, dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania, described private psychiatric hospitals of that period. His studies in the mid-1980s