The Art of Distraction

Photo: Brett Weinstein

Hanif Kureishi’s profound and provocative essay, “The Art of Distraction” in the Sunday Review section of the Times (NYT, 2/18/12) will undoubtedly prove very troubling to some readers whose children are suffering from learning disorders and who have experienced success using drugs like Ritalin. Here is Kureishi, the brilliant director of My Beautiful Laundrette, “You could say that attention needs to be paid to intuition; that one can learn to attend to the hidden self, and there might be something there worth listening to. If the Ritalin boy prefers obedience to creativity, he may be sacrificing his best interests in a way that might infuriate him later. A flighty mind might be going somewhere.” The essay is loaded with gems like this. Kureishi had trouble learning as does one of his sons and in the throes of his adolescence he went through a particularly wretched period. “I was suffering from a form of intellectual anorexia—the refusal to be given anything, to take anything in. As a result of that self-stymieing, I lost hope and believed I’d never catch up or achieve anything.” Many jeremiads about those suffering from symptoms like the ones Kureishi describes point to the consequences of not using drugs. Kureishi points to the consequences of using them, but the path he charts out is one that is not free of things like pain, disappointment and ostracism. He freely admits that he dreamt frequently of the rewards of possessing what one would suppose to be a typical high functioning analytic intelligence and of the feelings of belonging such a gift can produce. But he obviously believes that the pain he endured was justified—if sensibility itself is a just reward. “Ritalin and other forms of enforcement and psychological policing are the contemporary equivalent of the old practice of tying up children’s hands in bed, so they won’t touch their genitals. The parent stupefies the child for the parent’s good.” Undoubtedly there will be lots of irate letters to the Times about this piece, and that itself is a good thing. Those who come out on either side of this issue might recall Baudelaire’s famous words, “hypocrite lecteur,--mon semblable,--mon frère!”

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Grief could be in and Asberger’s out, of the upcoming fifth edition of the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) that is--according to the Times (“Grief Could Join List of Disorders," "NYT,1/24/12). “Depression can and does occur in the wake of bereavement, it can be severe and debilitating and calling it by any other name is doing a disservice to people who may require more careful attention,” the Times quotes Dr. Sidney Zisook, a shrink at U. Cal San Diego as saying. A follow up Op Ed piece by a writer named Benjamin Nugent ("I Had Asberger's Sydrome. Briefly," NYT 1/31/12) who’d been the subject of a film called “Understanding Asberger’s, supports “narrowing” the definition of Asberger’s and goes on to conclude, “I don’t want a kid with mild autism to go untreated. But I don’t want a school psychologist to give a clumsy, lonely teenager a description of his mind that isn't true.” Nugent appears to have been one such teenager and the film in which he appeared “was a research project directed” by his mother. So how to vote? The issue does have serious implications in that diagnosis can affect medical coverage. Those suffering from depression following the death of a loved could be covered for treatment while some patients who were once considered to be suffering from Asberger’s might find themselves in the lurch when it comes to getting help. Nugent may have suffered from the stigma of misdiagnosis, but some other young man or woman, with far more debilitating symptoms, might suddenly find him or herself deprived of a needed support system. Still defining mental illness seems to be a sometimes arbitrary and even trendy affair. In the 50’s, people whispered the word “nervous breakdown” like the characters in a Neil Simon play who are constantly whispering about "cancer." Today bipolarity seems to have taken over as the mental illness du jour. Could so many people be bipolar? And then there are learning disorders like ADD. It’s nice to know that some slow learners are simply having trouble concentrating and that a dose Ritalin might be just the cure for their hyperactivity, but could whole populations of children require medication for their supposed attention deficit disorders? One would hope that matters like these would be addressed by the editors of the forthcoming edition of the DSM, but then one would have to ask who will be applying the criteria. “A Mind is a Terrible Things to Waste,” was a slogan coined by the United Negro College Fund back in l972. But it’s resonant in the context of the current controversies about diagnosis. Is there any such thing as true objectivity when a mind is evaluating another mind?