Is Ritalin the new “Mother’s little helper”?

IN the 1960s and 1970s, Valium (and associated benzodiazepines – benzos) were known as “Mother’s Little Helper”- a drug prescribed to stay at home mothers to help them deal with their lives – fundamentally, a way of sedating them so they would accept a life they were unhappy or bored with.

What a drag it is getting old
Kids are different today,
I hear ev’ry mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she’s not really ill
Theres a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of a mother’s little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day
(Mother’s Little Helper, Rolling Stones)

By all accounts, it was an epidemic of medico-sanctioned drug abuse. A generation of women rendered passive, incapable of dealing with their dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Stepford wives.

Fast forward to the 1990s and 2000s. the drug de jour is Ritalin and other uppers to deal with ADD. ADHD, adult ADHD, etc.

Now I am not saying these syndromes do not exist. Nor that the drugs don’t work for some people. But then the Valium worked pretty well for women in the 1960s and 1970s.

But the explosion of diagnoses, and of prescriptions makes me suspicious. Are we waiting for someone to write a song about how we medicated our difficult children? What cost will they pay in their adult lives, when they haven’t learned to deal with their concentration, focus and behaviour without medication? What physiological effect will the drugs have one them?

And whose “illness” are we medicating?

For the full Rolling Stones Song, click here: Rolling Stones: Mother’s Little Helper

Memories……

Memory is a funny thing. What one person remembers can be quite different from another person. Some of it is perspective, some of it might be personal views on the important aspects of an event. Apparently what language you speak and hence what words you have at your disposal also affects what you understand and remember about events. Presumably NLP works differently in different languages.

Most people seem to have their first memories around 4 or 5, although if you try to remember your earliest memory it is difficult to separate what you remember from what you have been told and photographs you have seen. My mother in particular seems to have taken advantage of this and denies events that I specifically remember in an attempt I allege is a rewriting of history. Her brother, meanwhile, used to allege that he could remember being born. Clearly we are a family for whom the truth has been a malleable concept.

But while our memories are already somewhat fallible tools, imagine if, like Star Trek, you had a holo-deck, and could create completely fictional events. You could people your events with real colleagues, friends and acquaintances. And while to you, they would seem to be real experiential memories, the other people would have absolutely no knowledge of the events you created.

PS Stumbleupon just showed me a Wikipedia page on parataxic distortion which expands on this concept.

Stephen

They say that in a group of 23 people, there will be two people who share a birthday. I have only ever found one person who shared my birthday and birth year. That was Stephen. This is a very small excerpt of his story, the little bit that he was in my life.

Stephen.

Stephen was creative, a lateral thinker in a creative way that was not in any way applicable to work. He would leave funny little messages in the communication book at work (and apparently had graffitied a number of them in the library at Adelaide University, where he studied medicine). He was bright, very witty, but somehow a little out of step with the stereotypic doctor. And he loved to laugh.

Stephen drove the “fast brown car” which was an appalling poo-brown falcon in terrible condition. He had to put the front seat back in so I could sit in it – and it probably wasn’t very safe. It was fast brown car mark two – the first one had been trashed at a party when people jumped all over it (quite probably encouraged by Stephen).

As we were the same age, and attended uni at the same time in a relatively small city, it was inevitable that we knew people in common – and in fact had attended the same parties (most notably one in some share houses in North Adelaide featuring a band called “Buster Hymen and the Penetrators”. Classy. We were young, we thought it was funny. And it was certainly a memorable name. I can remember it almost three decades later.)

I met Stephen when we worked together at a medical service. We briefly dated but nothing came of it and we became friends instead, companions in the still dark nights inhabited by the chronically ill and the drug seeking. The living dead. We shared gallows humour and kept each other going. At least he kept me going. He was funny, zany, and bizarre, creative. He loved to entertain and confuse with his very off-beat humour. We would go out to breakfast at the Hilton and the Hyatt after night shift ended, with a group from a few other medical services and the local hospital A&Es. It was great to be relaxing and taking our time, then heading home while the rest of the world rushed off to work.

Stephen killed himself when we were 26.

He went home after night shift, put a tourniquet around his arm and shot up 15 ampoules of morphine. He was a doctor, so he had access and he knew what he was doing – almost. He was a big man – tall and solid (he called himself fat boy), and he passed out before he could release the tourniquet. The morphine didn’t kill him, but he wasn’t found for 12 hours, when he didn’t turn up to his next shift. He had been breathing about once a minute all day and had wiped out most of his brain from lack of oxygen. I had last spoken to him three hours prior to when he would have done it, when my shift finished before his. I could not tell anything was wrong. Even in retrospect, there were no signs. Nothing.

He spent the next two weeks in a coma in intensive care, in the hospital where he had trained. I have never prayed for someone to die, but for Stephen, I did. With the brain damage – only the brain stem was still functioning – he could never be more than a vegetable. This was an appalling outcome for a man who had been so lively, so witty, so clever. He had lived from his brain, his intelligence, and his charm. Just as arrangements were being made to transfer him to a permanent ward – a ward of the living dead where bodies that refuse to die are fed and washed – mercifully, he died. I doubt his family felt that way at the time, and maybe they still don’t, but for those with any medical knowledge, it was a blessing.

It was still terrible. I lost one stone of weight in a week. I retreated into compulsive behaviours – horse-riding and playing the same song over and over – Baby Animals ‘Lights out at Eleven’, (below). Even now I occasionally think about him, what he is missing, what his family is missing because he chose the way out that he did, what could have been. No condemnation, just deep sadness.

I heard his grandparents couldn’t believe he had suicided, and believed he had been murdered. His sisters were of course devastated. His parents kindly sent me a photograph and a letter. I can no longer picture his face except for the photograph, which is etched in my mind. I can’t imagine his voice any more. The letter spoke of their ongoing disbelief at what had happened. Pride at the man he was and how loved he was by so many friends, disbelief at what happened and a fathomless grief at the utterly unexpected and inexplicable turn of events that had taken him from them irrevocably. Their lives altered forever.

So why did he do it? I will never really know, but I heard much later that his girlfriend had got pregnant and she had had an abortion. He was brought up Catholic and couldn’t deal with it – in his mind, she had killed their baby. This post is not meant to be either anti-abortion, or anti-religion. There is no moral of the story, the meaning you overlay on the story says more about you than it does about Stephen or his girlfriend. The story is what it is, no more. And it may not be correct – it may be only the Chinese whispers that follow this sort of tragedy as people try to make sense of the insensible – and some try to lay blame.

There is no blame to be laid.

Thanks to the modern wonder of the internet, I can keep Stephen alive a little. I haven’t mentioned his surname, and I won’t post his photograph because he belongs to others – to his family. I can only share my memories, keep his humour, his bizarreness, his creativity alive in my mind. It was meaningful at the time. And we were young. This should never have happened, but it was his choice.

I am tempted to say, as they do, he will always be young, but he won’t. He is gone. He will never be anything now. He was my friend, but all I have is a photograph and a few scraps of paper.

****

If you are feeling distressed, please seek help. Don’t choose a permanent solution to a temporary problem, no matter how overwhelming it feels right now.

Why do you need permission?

A former boss, whom I greatly admired (and still do), introduced me to the saying “better to beg forgiveness than to ask for permission”.

I am not sure if it a generation thing, or just me, but when I was growing up, and starting my career, whenever I wanted to do something the answer was always – go and do some study, get a degree, get a job in the industry, get some experience, work your way up the ladder. All very safe and sound advice….but fundamentally stopped me from actually doing what I wanted to do. More fool me.

Gen Y doesn’t seem to have this problem, nor the Millenials, and whatever nickname has been allocated to more recent generations.

Case study number one – my friend’s son, who at age 18 with a friend wrote, cast and filmed a movie (The Powder Clock, below). Sounds like an amateurish exercise? It really isn’t, the production values are very good. As I said to his mother, she had clearly forgotten to tell him that 18 year olds can’t make movies.

Many years ago, I did a course called Money and You, which at that stage was associated with Robert Kiyosaki. One of the things that I distinctly remember him saying was that if you see a job that needs doing, it’s yours. What he meant was – this was your opportunity, and opportunities aren’t thrown your way for you to get someone else to do them, they are thrown your way for you to do them. If you can see it, then you have identified your niche.

Case study number two – When twelve year old Craig Kielburger heard about a Pakistani boy his own age who was murdered for speaking about about child labour, he started a charity called Free the Children with some classmates. It now works with the United Nations and has been a recipient on Oprah’s Angel Network. (For more examples of children who have started charities, try this website.)

So what if your passion is to start your own business? Think you need to get a business degree or an MBA? Attract seed capital? Again – if you don’t think you need permission, there’s nothing stopping you.

Case study number three - Its actually quite difficult to choose, there are so many child entrepreneurs. Some are marketing to kids, others (such as Archer from Leanna’s Hair Leanna ) market to adults and have international delivery options. Google child entrepreneur and prepare to be confronted with why you haven’t got your act together yet! (Of course it has to be recognised that these kids have very supportive parents who have facilitated their businesses happening, since they are underage and therefore unable to sign a contract….but still.)

Inspiring Commencement Addresses

We don’t really have the same culture of commencement addresses in Australia that the US seems to have. And while I am sure many commencement addresses are forgettable, every so often one pops up on Youtube (or elsewhere) that is amazing. Here are a few of my favourites….

Steve Jobs, Stanford University 2005
Jobs talks about getting fired from Apple and how he came back from that devastating setback.

***

Professor Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon, 2008
Prof Pausch was dying of cancer when he made a surprise return to Carnegie Mellon University.

“We don’t beat the reaper by living longer. We beat the reaper by living well… The question is, what do we do between the time we’re born and the time he shows up?”

***

Oprah Winfrey, Stanford University, 2008
After first embarrassing her god-daughter and giving us a view of the human side of Oprah, she talks about finding her way and the challenges she faced overcoming set ideas of what a television personality looked like early in her career.

***

JK Rowling, Harvard 2008
The Harry Potter author talks about her imagination and creativity at a young age and how her parents, wanting the best for her, encouraged “straight” education over the classics and artistic pursuits that interested her.

The commencement address Kurt Vonnegut didn’t do

Have you heard of Mary Schmich? Of the Chicago Tribune?

No, neither have I. And that is where urban legends begin.

On 1 June 1997, Mary Schmich, a journalist with the Chicago Tribune, wrote a fantasy commencement speech entitled Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young. It was a thoughtful take on “what I wish someone had told me when I was young”. She wrote it, according to her, high on caffeine, one Friday afternoon. She had no idea how it would change her life!

But of course, the idea that an unknown journalist had written it wasn’t good enough, and hence a “better” name had to be attached to it to get the viral coverage that this commencement speech has had.

Enter Kurt Vonnegut. (Yes, apparently Vonnegut is a better name that Schmich. Slightly easier to pronounce, but a whole lot better known.) Of course it wasn’t really Kurt himself, but someone unknown attached Kurt Vonnegut’s name to the commencement speech, the date 1997 and the place MIT, and it took off. (Actually Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan gave the MIT commencement speech in 1997.)

Vonnegut himself told the New York Times, “What she wrote was funny, wise and charming, so I would have been proud had the words been mine.” Meanwhile, Mary Schmich was inundated by people accusing her of plagiarism. If you read it on the internet, it must be true…..

Still, despite the confusion , Schmich did come out of it smiling. In 1998 she published the essay as a short book (Wear Sunscreen: A Primer for Real Life). She went on to win the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

So, giving credit where credit is due, Mary Schmich, here is the commencement speech….”

Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term effects of sunscreen have been proven by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more than my experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But, trust me, in twenty years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall, in a way you can’t grasp now, how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagined.

Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but remember, that worrying does about as much good as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing gum. The real troubles in your life are likely to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4:00 p.m. on a Tuesday.

Do one thing everyday that scares you.

Sing.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people that are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don’t waste your time with jealousy.

Sometimes you’re ahead; sometimes you’re behind. The race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember the complements you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep old love letters. Throw away old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what to do with your life. Some of the most interesting people I knew at 20 didn’t know what they were going to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40 yr. olds I know still don’t.

Get plenty of calcium.

Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, and maybe you’ll do the FUNKY CHICKEN on your 75th wedding anniversary.

Whatever you do don’t congratulate yourself, or berate yourself too much. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.

Enjoy your body and use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it or what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

Dance, even if the only place to do it is in your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they will be gone for good.

Be nice to your siblings. They are your link to the past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go and with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get the more you need the people that knew you when you were young.

Live in New York once, but leave it before it makes you hard.

Live in California once, but leave it before it makes you soft.

Travel.

Accept certain unalienable truths; prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old. And when you do, you will fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund and maybe you have a wealthy wife, but you never know when either one will run out on you.

Don’t mess too much with your hair or by the time you’re 40 your hair will look 85.

Be careful whose advise you buy, but be patient with the people that provide the advice. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.

The joy of Airport Bookshops

picure credit Richard Humphrey, licenced under Creative Commons

One of my traditions, when I am travelling, is to buy a book at the Airport Bookshop.

Yes, I could buy in advance and turn up to the airport prepared. I could purchase on Kindle and save myself the additional weight to lug around in my hand luggage. And I am taking a risk that there won’t be anything I particularly want to read.

But somehow, Airport Bookshops always come through for me. Even the airports where most of the books are not in English.

I should stipulate that I find it difficult to walk past a bookshop at any time without finding something to buy. But somehow Airport Bookshops are different.

So what is it about Airport Bookshops? Do they get books published overseas sooner than other bookshops? Do they select particularly for the passenger like me who wants to pick something fascinating up at the last minute? They do often have a good range of business and investment books, presumably catering for the business traveller. Or perhaps it is my frame of mind, where I am looking forward to going somewhere, getting ready for a long period of uncharacteristic enforced stillness and seeking some distraction.

A recent trip through Changi Airport unearthed these gems:

Steal Like an Artist – which is about how to be creative and rise above mental blocks.
Business Model You – which turns out actually to be about careers, but applies business planning methodology to designing and achieving in your career.

Neither of these I had seen (at that stage – 2 months ago) in local bookshops.

Previous scoops have included Freakonomics (using economic and statistic methods to examine societal issues, behaviour and problems) Blink (and other Malcolm Gladwell books), Millionaire Next Door (a fascinating statistical study on the self-made wealthy I the US a the real people, not the movie stars and Donald Trumps), The Psychopath Test (written by the same man who wrote Men who stare at Goats – fascinating!)

Of course one downside is if, like me, you want to take your books home for possible rereading in the future, they take up a lot of your luggage allowance. But its worth it!

And the moral of the story is……I should be flying more!

The Second Parent

Friends of mine decided, when the husband was offered a package at work, that he would take a year off and be the stay at home parent while his wife went back to work to re-establish her career.

While he loved staying home with his sons, he found it incredibly lonely. None of his friends were stay at home dads, and in his sons’ school classes, the were no stay at home dads. The mums at the school gate didn’t really connect with him – it was a Mother’s club, a women’s club. His presence put a damper on the conversation, a stilted politeness. They could hardly bitch about their husbands and sex lives with him present! (OK I admit that is a stereotype, made to illustrate the point.) While he loved staying at home and loved the time with his sons, he was relieved to go back to work and have adult conversations again.

So in a society where we lobby for equal career opportunities, equal pay for women, why is a man’s (and presumably a family’s) choice to stay home not supported by the community?

Fathers report being treated as the “second parent” by schools, medical practitioners, hospitals, childcare providers. And as a mother, I also find that frustrating. While I do want to be contacted and involved in decisions affecting my children, why should the father not also be contacted.

As the mother of sons, this would be an excellent example for my children to see, to grow up to be good men, involved and caring for their children.

And I am sure for fathers, it is disrespectful.

“Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.” Margaret Mead
Every time we liberate a man, we liberate a woman. Mudmap

How google revolutionised study

As the beginning of the school year rolls around (for the southern hemisphere) and I am once again tempted (but resisting) going back to university, I have been reflecting on the changes since I undertook my first degree, in the early 1990s.

I studied recreation management and planning, which was a fabulous degree. It was a very small intake, 40 students per year, so we all knew each other very well. To get into the course you not only had to have the right high school marks, you also had to write a couple of essays about why you wanted to do it, what your career ambitions were, and then sit and interview. I remember how excited I was when I was accepted!

Because we were such a small tight group, we cooperated for resources. At the beginning of each semester, we would form a production line at the photocopiers in the library and photocopy off the required readings for each student. These were the days before easy access to resources on computers, and before every student having a computer in their home. Microsoft dominance had not yet become entrenched and hence part of the course included being taught how to use the university’s computers. When deadlines rolled around the entire year would set up camp in the computer room at the university and stay there, sharing resources, ordering pizzas, and proof-reading each other’s assignments. Assignments had to be handed up in hard copy and bound, and hence the battle with the printer was a shared one.

Fast forward to a couple of years ago when I completed my most recent degree (I am a serial student with the university debts to show for it). I studied online with students from all around the world. In fact one of the really interesting things was hearing about people’s career paths in other countries and other fields.

All materials were sent electronically. Assignments were submitted electronically. Research could be done electronically. During this entire degree I did not set foot in a library for research purposes – when Google Scholar and PubMed can provide us with a wider range of peer-review journals and free access to books, photocopying sources in the library is no longer the time-consuming (and costly) exercise it was. As a result, hopefully there is a wider range of material being used for references….although too much information can be difficult to manage. (When I lectured at University, the undergrads all used to use the same quotes from the same sources. Very monotonous to mark. Post-grads were better.)

Studying as an activity has become entirely different. Possibly for those who study on-campus, ie: attend lectures rather than distance education, the experience might still be similar – the camaraderie, the networking. I still occasionally come across people I studied with in my work life and it is always great to look back on those days.

But as an adult with work and home responsibilities, the convenience of being able to log on at night without having to travel to campus has significant benefits. If distance education weren’t available I wouldn’t have done so much study.

And I wouldn’t be so tempted to go back again…..

Economic impact of the Toothfairy

Is the Tooth Fairy a good worker? On the one hand, somehow s/he manages to get around the world in an on-demand capacity, usually with little notice. On the other hand, in our house the Tooth Fairy was always pretty slack. Sometimes it took several nights (and repeated reminders from small children) before the Tooth Fairy finally turned up and did the financial deed. Conversations with friends showed that this was in fact a common experience. Apparently the usual excuse is a workload issue – so many children, unexpected tooth loss, etc. But eventually the tooth would be gone and money would be in its place…although the amount of money seemed to vary from house to house.

One of my sons, when aged about 8, decided to take control of the Tooth Fairy transactions. Having lost a molar, he decided that this was worth more money than your average baby tooth. So he wrote a contract on a scrap of paper and determined what he thought was a fair price – $51. Then, in order to enact the contract, he forged the Tooth Fairy’s signature, and left it out for the Tooth Fairy.

The flaw in the logic, of course, was that the Tooth Fairy would of course recognise that the signature was forged. Perhaps he was counting on s/he being very busy and somewhat distracted. Somewhat like his mother, in fact (although I don’t think I am THAT gullible!). Of course there may have been other flaws in the logic.

Now I would like to stress that the going rate for teeth in my house was nowhere near $51. It was more like $2, although there was some upward financial pressure when a substitute Tooth Fairy left $3 out one night – a precedent was set and could not be backed away from. Inflation had hit the exchange rate.

A friend argues very convincingly that the small decisions like Tooth Fairy rates are the basis of inflation in our economy. The argument goes like this.

If the Tooth Fairy starts leaving out more and more money per tooth, then the value of money to the child is devalued and hence pocket money rates have to rise. Small children with additional spending money hit the shops in a big way and canny retailers realise these children have no sense of the value of money, and hence they raise prices or create new and increasingly more crappy products with large price tags attached. If the prices of lollies, toys etc rise, then other food stuffs and household products rise so that parents think that the child’s purchases are still (in some scheme of things) worthwhile. And hey presto, inflation.

So – no pressure, Tooth Fairy – not only do you have to remember to turn up when teeth are laid out, but you need to make some serious decisions about exchange rates. Our economy depends you.