Harvard Psychologist: How About Tutoring Instead of Pills?

Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan said in an August 2 Spiegel interview that the greed of pharmaceutical companies and mental health workers has prompted them to incorrectly diagnose millions of children with mental illnesses.

In the last 50 years, the number of diagnosed cases of attention deficit disorders and chronic depression has skyrocketed, especially among minorities and lower income socioeconomic groups. While mental disorders in children were virtually unknown in the 1960s, official sources today label one in eight American children as mentally ill.

Kagan says the seismic increase wasn’t the result of an upsurge in psychological illnesses, but of a dangerous shift in the way experts label behavioral problems: “We have a 7-year-old child who is bored in school and disrupts classes. Back then, he was called lazy. Today, he is said to suffer from adhd (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). That’s why the numbers have soared.”

Kagan calls adhd—which 5.4 million American children have been diagnosed with—“an invention” of experts in his field: “Every child who’s not doing well in school is sent to see a pediatrician, and the pediatrician says: ‘It’s adhd; here’s Ritalin.’ In fact, 90 percent of these 5.4 million kids don’t have an abnormal dopamine metabolism. The problem is, if a drug is available to doctors, they’ll make the corresponding diagnosis.”

A second epidemic rapidly multiplying among children is depression.

In 1987, one out of 400 American adolescents was prescribed anti-depressants. In 2002, the number had leaped to one out of 40. Kagan says this sharp increase is “simply because the pills are available.” Kagan says that while there are some chronically depressed young people who are legitimately mentally ill, authorities should “look not just at the symptoms, but also at the causes.”

Kagan also addressed the topic of bipolar disorder, which around a million Americans under the age of 19 are said to suffer from today. This is up from virtually zero in the 1960s. “A group of doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital just started calling kids who had temper tantrums bipolar,” Kagan said. “They shouldn’t have done that. But the drug companies loved it because drugs against bipolar disorders are expensive. That’s how the trend was started. It’s a little like in the 15th century, when people started thinking someone could be possessed by the devil or hexed by a witch.”

He says the alternative to giving psychoactive drugs to children with behavioral abnormalities is simply to tutor them. “Who’s being diagnosed with adhd? Children who aren’t doing well in school. It never happens to children who are doing well in school. So what about tutoring instead of pills?”

Kagan is quick to clarify that not all mental illnesses are an invention of the pharmaceutical industry. “[T]here are people who suffer from schizophrenia, who hear their great-grandfather’s voice, for example, or who believe the Russians are shooting laser beams into their eyes. … There are people who, either for prenatal or inherited reasons, have serious vulnerabilities in their central nervous system that predispose them to … disorders. We should distinguish these people from all the others who are anxious or depressed because of poverty, rejection, loss or failure. The symptoms may look similar, but the causes are completely different.”

The views Kagan has expressed are nothing new to the Trumpet, but his stance is significant because he is one of the world’s leading authorities in child development. A 2002 ranking of the 20th century’s 100 most eminent psychologists published by a group of American academics placed Kagan in 22nd place, even above Ivan Pavlov and Carl Jung.

Kagan is no fringe practitioner, and his suggestion to prescribe tutoring in place of meds is refreshing because chemical combinations can’t replace child care. Millions of families have turned to drugs out of desperation, but they are treating symptoms and ignoring causes.

At one point in the interview, Kagan broadened the problem’s scope, saying, “[T]hat is the history of humanity: Those in authority believe they’re doing the right thing, and they harm those who have no power.”

Educator Herbert W. Armstrong wrote prolifically on this topic, explaining that scientific human reasoning has become contemporary society’s latest “messiah.” Leading scientists are often viewed as saviors for every social, moral and societal problem, but evidence is amassing which reveals that even the most advanced combinations of chemical, physical, physiological, psychiatric, pharmacological or psychosocial research cannot train the mind or build character in people. That is because, in spite of evolution-based hypotheses, the human mind is not a collection of organic tissue and chemicals. To learn more about the human mind and how children can attain physical, social and mental health, read What Science Can’t Discover About the Human Mind.