The workings of the human mind are still almost as much of a mystery to psychiatrists as they are to the general public, so it is hardly surprising that the treatment of psychological problems is often controversial.
But handing out drugs like Smarties to thousands of children with behavioural difficulties is reckless beyond words.
An estimated 8,000 young people are being given anti-psychotics, according to a BBC Panorama report, even though they are linked to numerous side-effects.
Although sometimes used for conditions such as schizophrenia, many are prescribed simply because a child has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder - even though there is debate over whether this exists or is simply a fancy way to describe bad behaviour.
Medication such as Ritalin, popularly known as a 'chemical cosh', is taken by 55,000 children, at a cost to the NHS of £28million a year.
Furthermore, research shows that, while it is initially successful in controlling behaviour, its effects soon wear off.
Of course, some young people do need drugs to deal with serious psychological problems. The worry is that too many are given them when they are not necessary. That isn't just a needless expense but, more importantly, can damage the child.
We must end indiscriminate prescription of powerful medication before we damage a generation.
RITALIN IS A DRUG DON'T GET YOU CHILD HOOKED
Lyrics for music above
Lets put on the Wiggles & pop a couple Ritalin Papa dont blame mama or tell her how lazy shes been Its been prescribed by a doctor and the doctor said it aint no sin So lets put on the Wiggles & pop a couple Ritalin
Lets put on MacGyver & chow a couple Xanax bars I dont need no college counselor to tell me how lucky I are I lay the blame on the clinic and man its got me this far Yeah, Lets put on MacGyver & chow a couple Xanax bars
Chorus:
If only Dad would have spanked me instead Of dopin me up and messing with my head I might have turned out to be a regular guy But its all that I know and I gotta get high
So lets put on some Soul Train and snort a little cocaine Ill chop some lines maybe one at a time till were feeling no pain Ill bite my tongue till its numb and Ill talk till I drive you insane Yeah, lets put on some Soul Train and snort a little cocaine
Chorus
So lets put on some Scooby Doo & smoke a couple doobie doos Ive been high since I was just a little guy in my Underoos I sit around on my ass smokin grass and watchin classic cartoons Yeah, lets put on some Scooby Doo & smoke a couple doobie doos Yeah, Lets put on some Scooby Doo & smoke a couple doobie doos
DON'T BE A PART OF IT, SAY NO TO DRUGGING OUR KIDS
We are chemically altering huge numbers of pupils to fit into a flat, failing model of education.
One of my cousins - a manic, smart six-year-old who finds sit-down-and-shut-up school excruciating - was diagnosed a year ago with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). He now quietly pops Ritalin, a drug that is chemically almost identical to cocaine, and sits more passively on the settee, at the desk or in the car, concentrating on whatever is put in front of him. He's not alone: every year since 1999, the number of children taking the drug has surged by an average 31 per cent.
So I was intrigued when I heard that Dr Robert Spitzer, the psychiatrist who first identified ADHD and introduced it to the medical journals, now believes up to 30 per cent of such diagnoses are "mistaken".
In Adam Curtis's dazzling new documentary The Trap, he says many of these kids are being drugged simply for "displaying normal reactions which are not really disorders at all".
This is bad enough - but the more I burrowed into the ADHD literature, the more I began to believe that the problems with ADHD in our kids point to wider problems in our Attention Deficit Democracy, and especially in the way we teach our children.
Let's start with the diagnostic problems. When you look at the criteria for classifying a child with ADHD - quickly bored, abandons projects that don't interest him, restlessness - they are easily mistaken for the qualities shown by a clever child. (Indeed, one of the questions asked on the Brown Scale, a tool sometimes used in the US to initially detect ADHD, is "Does your child 'act smart'?") A significant number of Spitzer's misdiagnosed 30 per cent may well be children who are persistently rebelling against a regimented and tedious school system and end up being drugged for it.
Our schools are still overwhelmingly based on the outdated model of a factory, preparing kids to sit in rows, be obedient and get ready for six working decades of the same. It was always barbaric, but now - with our economy requiring more creativity and entrepreneurship from more of the population - it's also bad economics. Does anybody think that grilling children in groups of 30 to be prepared for dull and repetitive tests is the best way to create a questioning, thinking populace?
It is no coincidence that ADHD and Ritalin have risen as corporal punishment was phased out. Until the 1970s, the dull factory model of schooling was upheld with the sanction of physical force: if you didn't sit through it obediently, you were beaten. Now that is (thankfully) no longer permitted, we have replaced the cane with a cane-for-the-brain.
But the problem does not lie solely in misdiagnosing ADHD - it's also in how we understand it, and what we do with the "sufferers". The most prominent way of understanding ADHD today is the "biomedical model", which sees it as an objective neurological problem, arising from genetic abnormalities in the brain.
The followers of this model point to PET scans which show that people with ADHD have differently constituted brains. But London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus than the rest of us, because they are constantly exercising this mental muscle to find streets. Similarly, people with ADHD might have a different-shaped brain because of the way they behave, rather than the other way round.
There is another, better way of understanding ADHD. After his son was first diagnosed with the condition, the liberal American writer Thom Hartman came up with "the farmer-hunter hypothesis". Some 10,000 years ago, humans moved from being hunter-societies - here impulsiveness, restlessness and risk-taking were essential for survival - to being farmer-societies, where it was more important to be predictable, dependable and obedient. Kids with ADHD have all the impulses of a hunter society - stuck in a settled farmers' world.
This theory chimed instinctively with the experience of my cousin. When I see him dying to jump up and run around, it strikes me how unnatural it is to expect a six-year-old boy to want to be cooped up all day, sitting in a chair, and then come home and do homework. He seems to be almost physically twitching to run through fields and spear animals.
There is some scientific evidence to support this: researchers of the University of Irvine, in California, recently traced the DRD4 7R gene, which seems to correlate with many features of ADHD. They found that it emerged 40,000 years ago, and conferred a significant advantage on the early humans who had it.
But given that we aren't going to return to the (actually pretty miserable) life of pre-modern hunters, are ADHD people just an evolutionary dead end? On the contrary - many of these skills are extremely useful now. A number of entrepreneurs and artists exhibit the symptoms: for example, David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue Airways and inventor of the e-ticket, says his success is "entirely" due to ADHD. Thinking about a dozen things at once, hating being told what to do - these might make you a bad pupil, but they often make you a successful grown-up.
Hartman's arguments are valuable because they show that ADHD "sufferers" have different, but not inferior brains. Following this theory, he has set up a successful school in New Hampshire for children with ADHD, which , rather than drugging them so they can sit through the tedium of the chalk-and-talk schooling revered by Chris Woodhead, keeps them as stimulated as their brains require.
The British government should be prescribing less Ritalin and building more schools like this. (Their recent expansion of Steiner schools - which are based on progressive aims - is a good first step.)
But there's a lesson here for all our children: for all the talk of "personalised learning", my teacher friends say their profession is becoming more conservative, reverting to disengaged, just-listen classes.
There's a (slightly hyperbolic) historical analogy for the decision to medicalise children's natural resistance to this. In 1851, a Louisiana physician called Samuel L Cartwright identified the affliction of "drapetomania" (drapeto means "to flee"), which afflicted runaway slaves, compelling them to escape. "With proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many negroes have of running away can be entirely prevented," he counselled. And with proper medical advice, we can make children accept an excruciating, test-obsessed model of schooling.
This isn't just bad for kids with ADHD - and the tens of thousands who have been misdiagnosed with it - but for a country that needs engaged, thinking adults. For more than a decade now, we have been chemically altering huge numbers of our children to fit into this flat, failing model of education. Wouldn't it be better to change the education system to fit our children?
