The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [53]
The ads and hospitalizations eventually were curtailed by a competing economic force—the very one that boosted Ritalin sales. With the 1990s came managed care and an emphasis on short-term, out-patient mental health care. Insurance companies were no longer willing to pay out the $30 billion a year it was costing them for child and adolescent psychiatric hospitalization.75
The price for the promiscuous institutionalization of teenagers was not borne, however, only by insurance companies, their customers, or the kids who got locked up. As is so often true when middle- and upper-income Americans purchase escape hatches from their anxieties, the poor also paid. During the period of reckless expansion of private psychiatric hospitals uninsured children with severe psychiatric problems had trouble obtaining care. Between the mid-1970s and late 1980s the number of children and adolescents in public psychiatric facilities actually decreased.76
Bad to the Bone: Crack Babies
The idea that some children are born bad gets applied to poor and minority children with a vengeance. Many of them get written off as irredeemable.
“Crack babies,” the focus of cover stories in Newsweek,Time, and other major news outlets in the late 1980s and early 1990s, are a revealing case in point. The New York Times declared in a page-one story that these children have “brain damage that cuts into their ability to make friends, know right from wrong, understand cause and effect, control their impulses, gain insight, concentrate on tasks, and feel and return love.” What, a front-page story in the Washington Post asked, will become of our schools when “teachers become preoccupied with the crack-affected youngsters’ overwhelming problems”? The expense alone was said to be staggering. “Just to get one crack baby ready for school costs more than $40,000 a year,” the Los Angeles Times exclaimed in an editorial. “For all 8,974 babies [identified nationally] that could add up to $1.5 billion before they are 5 years old!” (exclamation in the original).77
This is only the beginning. An essayist in Newsweek wondered what would become of “the very fabric of society” by the year 2000, when thousands of crack babies enter adulthood. A “CBS Evening News” report concluded with the foster mother of a crack baby speculating, “She may in fact be[come] a twenty-one-year-old with an IQ of perhaps fifty, barely able to dress herself and probably unable to live alone.”78
No group of people deserves to be demonized from birth, but the stigmatization of children of crack users was particularly undeserved. Reporters and their editors had good reason to question the term crack baby itself. For one thing, the typical crack-abusing mother uses a spectrum of other drugs, from alcohol and marijuana to amphetamines and heroin. Some journalists alluded to this pattern of polydrug use in their stories but promptly negated its relevance by baptizing crack the “most frequent ingredient in the mix” (Time) or declaring that the “crack epidemic has created a generation of youngsters who can sap even the most tenacious parent’s strength” (Washington Post), as if crack per se were the culprit.79
Journalists depicted crack babies as a breed apart, even though they had information to the contrary. “Trying to identify crack-affected children through behavior alone is tricky,” as one Washington Post reporter put it. “Many of these children look and act like other kids,” Time noted, hastening to add, “but their early exposure to cocaine makes them less able to overcome negative influences like a disruptive family life.”80
In the first several years after birth cocaine-exposed kids develop normally, studies show, if they are given basic nutrition, education, and nurturance.