As both a former teacher and mom of boy(s), I have often feared that we are drugging our boys for the illness of being . . . boys. Rather than shaping our schools to meet boys' needs, we shape the boys with chemicals to make them meet the school's needs. I often wonder what we'll be learning about those medicated boys' health conditions twenty or thirty years from now when they are raising boys of their own. Chemicals have consequences.
As one who has grieved deeply the loss of a young sister and a young husband, I have also known those who think the answer to grief is a pill. And you can take pills, and I have, but the person you grieve remains dead. There is no pill for that.
In a recent conversation among the three of us who live together in this house that sprang from an observation that those who have become known as hoarders are mentally ill, we observed the absurdity that seemingly everything has become a mental illness, and if everyone who ever does anything from stupid to seriously damaging is only mentally ill, then he or she isn't responsible. He or she should just take a pill.
This editorial in the New York Times speaks eloquently of the illness of being human.
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