Yet the mother of a Reed College student who died of a drug overdose (background on Reed’s drug problem here) makes a telling complaint:
In [Barbara] Tepper’s … letter [to the Reed campus], she … urged Reed College to provide more counseling to students struggling with stress, to expel and not just suspend students who use or distribute illegal drugs and faulted college counselors for prescribing sleeping pills to her son who had trouble sleeping.
“I was very upset because that’s sending a very clear message if you don’t feel good, chemicals will solve your problem,” Tepper said in an interview Thursday. She said that when she learned her son was given sleeping pills by a campus psychiatrist, she was furious.“I told Sam, ‘You’re 20 years old. I don’t want you taking sleeping pills. Go out and run around the block. Make yourself physically tired, and you’ll fall asleep.”
The larger point here, about America as a profoundly pill-dependent culture, and about the way easy recourse to pills can predispose people toward overuse and abuse as well as weaken their ability to solve their problems non-chemically, is a terribly important one.
May 15th, 2010 at 2:12PM
Although the spirit of UD’s remarks is OK, one phrase caught my eye: “solve their problems non-chemcially”
A lot of college/university health services help students solve their problems chemically. Anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, birth control pills: all are chemicals.
Sleeping pills? Sorry, I can think of some circumstances under which a 20 yr old might be a suitable candidate. This is not in the same class with anti-psychotics for two year olds.
And I am not endorsing the lax attitude of Reed College administration toward drug abuse here either.
May 15th, 2010 at 2:13PM
non-chemically (ouch)
May 15th, 2010 at 3:11PM
I take your point, Bonzo. I should have distinguished among types of chemicals and conditions.
May 15th, 2010 at 7:21PM
I’m sorry, but it’s a long way from medically-recommended sedatives to heroin, and conflating the two without actual connective evidence is sloppy thinking, at best.
May 15th, 2010 at 9:28PM
I don’t think so. It’s – as advertised – speculative thinking. Most observers note that, for example, the overuse of Ritalin among young boys seems to have acculturated many of them to pill popping generally. And I wasn’t taking it all the way to heroin; nor was the student’s mother. We’re not conflating. We’re suggesting a possible narrative in the direction of more and more use of drugs – and in particular here, a kind of mainstreaming of drugs, in which psychiatrists rather immediately go toward the prescription of sleeping pills without exploring other options. Daniel Carlat’s new book, which I reviewed recently for Inside Higher Education, elaborates on this point.
May 16th, 2010 at 4:39PM
I’m sorry for Mrs. Tepper’s loss. As a parent of college students I share her concerns. Reed College and others may make a big show of having zero tolerance for illegal drugs.
Yet student health services seem to freely hand out prescriptions for Adderall, Ritalin and other widely abused amphetamines with no more thought than stamping books at the library checkout.
May 16th, 2010 at 10:38PM
You connected this case to ‘Reed’s drug problem’ which, according to your link, is heroin.
May 16th, 2010 at 11:45PM
Didn’t mean to give that impression. Reed’s drug problem is not merely about heroin.