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Point of View with Barb
Sumner Burstyn - July 14 2003
Media campaigns create world with an ill
for every pill
A couple of years ago an editorial in Vanity Fair described magazine
feature writers and columnists as short-term obsessives. Ever since,
I've considered it a label of prestige, the perfect description
for my roving mind and insatiable curiosity. But not any more. I
took a test and it seems I have Adult Attention Deficit Disorder
(AADD), otherwise known as Executive Function Disorder (EFD).
My husband has it, too. Between us we exhibit just about every
symptom on the 60-question list. From an internal sense of anxiety,
frequently misplaced car keys and reading the instructions only
when all else fails, to being argumentative, keeping a messy desk
and abhorring routine.
But not to worry. At great cost, science has come up with the
answer: a range of medications that will modify our behaviours and
make us calm and composed and above all functional in an undistracted,
tidy-desk, list-making, consistent kind of way.
How did I find out I was suffering from this illness? I saw an
advertisement in a magazine.
Medical advertising aimed at healthy consumers is the latest effort
by pharmaceutical companies to extend their profit margins. Some
call it disease mongering. Canadian researcher Barbara Mintzes calls
it the medicalisation of normal human experience. The media campaigns
educate people to see themselves as patients. They encourage healthy
people to believe they need medical attention, in effect creating
a world where there's an ill for every pill. Everything - from social
phobias, the illness that used to be known as shyness, to ageing,
the biggest growth sickness in the pharmaceutical world - is now
a treatable illness.
It makes perfect sense. Certainly more than focusing on the truly
sick who may get better or the dying who will no longer be buying,
let alone impoverished, disease-ridden, developing countries. Better
to maximise profits by creating new definitions and categories of
illness and foisting them on to healthy consumers.
The need to recoup the costs of expensive research and development
is also leading the expansion of applications for drugs. So a treatment
for the sleep disorder narcolepsy is now being used as an alertness
aid for healthy people. Testosterone supplements, intended for men,
are being used by women to beef up their aggression in the competitive
business world. Beta blockers, once the salvation of heart patients,
are now used to alleviate fear under pressure.
Last year the British Medical Journal produced a Top 20 list of
new non-diseases. The list included bags under the eyes, big ears,
balding, grey hair, ugliness, freckles, cellulite, penis envy, road
rage, loneliness and unhappiness. The number-one illness was ageing.
And just last week it was revealed that over 10,000 healthy American
children are taking a growth hormone for the "disease" of being
short, even though the medication is not authorised for that.
Of course the pharmas deny there's any link between the increasing
medicalisation of society and their perfectly pitched propaganda.
They are, according to industry advocates, just providing information
and helping consumers to take charge of their health.
Are they being disingenuous or do they really believe that millions
of advertising dollars are somehow socially neutral?
What happens to society when the conditions of being human - being
forgetful, untidy, short, bald or old are seen as disease? And what
happens if in acknowledging our "illness" we choose not to fix it?
Will that make those who chose to age naturally, who remain shy
or vertically challenged, the pariahs of our society?
Extrapolate that to the not-too-distant future when genetic screening
becomes commonplace. Will apparently healthy people be labelled
"sick" decades before they become so? And how will we view those
parents who decide to continue a pregnancy with a less than perfect
child? And in our perfection-obsessed, diversity-intolerant society,
how will that less than perfect child be received?
Of course society has, in various ways, always marginalised those
who were different. But now it is the pharmas who are doing the
categorising and marginalising, defining society with their marketing
budgets and their surplus drugs. The result is chillingly different.
In this brave new individualistic world it is the dysfunction of
individuals that is highlighted, not the dysfunction of environments.
By attributing difficult behaviour or even the natural variance
that is part of being human to medical disorders we obscure the
political, economic, and social contributors.
I suppose I should be grateful for my AADD diagnosis. I now have
an excuse for my frequent moves, the quick dispatching of husbands
one and two, and my inconsistent work performance. And all along
I thought the troubles were my fault, a result of my poor vertical
thinking skills, my bad attitude to authority and just plain boredom.
And that's where the redefinition of normal human behaviour as disease
affects us all. It makes each of us both more responsible for our
behaviour and profoundly less so but in all the wrong ways.
Although, once I get going on my meds I'm sure I'll notice a difference.
No more procrastination-inspired creativity, no more mood swings
and, finally, a tidy desk. But the question remains: will I be able
to find my keys?
ENDS
© Barbara Sumner Burstyn, 2003
Send your comments to:
Barbara Sumner
Burstyn.
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