Iqra’i

The Reactionary Epicurean pulls out all the stops in his frenzied crusade against the Prozac Nation: scientific expertise, dead white male poetry, and cute cartoon animals.

Insofar as he’s attacking a system that refuses to indulge unique problems with unique solutions, I’m on board — I don’t want to see a society whose individuals operate exclusively within a “medicated mean” of accepted mood range than he does. (In practice, of course, that’s not the way it works — which is why there’s more than one chemical type of antidepressant or ADD/ADHD drug — but he knows that as well as I.) But somewhere over the course of his posts he steps over the line, and starts attacking the practice of medication itself–under any circumstance or condition, for any individual.

I’m just going to assert this flat out: If you don’t think that depression or ADD/ADHD are legitimate neurological disorders, you haven’t listened to anyone who actually suffers from them. (I’ve never been convinced that ADD and ADHD are medically different, but I’m certainly open to persuasion on this count.) To live with one of these disorders isn’t to have slightly higher hurdles to achieving what you want to achieve, let alone the chaos of a “dancing star” that drives one to accomplish things. It’s to feel absolutely incapable of taking action, whatsoever, at all. A patient on antidepressants is most at risk of suicide when he first starts treatment because his feeling of utter immobility has begun to erode, to the point that he’s aware of at least one thing he can do. The RE can romanticize the man whose brain works by rules different from those of the world all he wants, but when that man’s brain feels completely disconnected from the world around it he becomes not an Ubermensch, but a bell-jar solipsist.

It’s true that using medication to function in the everyday world often leads to becoming no more than an everyday human being. But that’s just because the processes of socialization and manufactured conformity that weren’t possible before become possible. The life of my imagination wasn’t less rich after I started taking Adderall than it was before — it began to transform only once I started to notice that there were directions I could channel it that wouldn’t keep me from interacting with other people. (And I think it’s pretty obvious that channeling imagination is just as necessary for the production of genius as having imagination in the first place — otherwise there’s no way for Calvin to turn into Nietzsche, or anyone else.)

The fault of the medicated age is that we lump legitimate neurological outliers — those who couldn’t function normally if they tried — with anyone to the left or right of the median. The RE, and the critics he echoes, make the same mistake. The question we should be asking isn’t how many Calvins we’ve put on Adderall; it’s how many Nietzsches we could have had if we gave everyone the ability to take the actions they desired, and didn’t rely on those who couldn’t follow social rules to transcend them.

_{Quite incidentally, I note that the RE has no such qualms about self-medication. Whence the distinction, sir?}