I have been following the discussions on Furious Seasons and elsewhere about the newly mandated mental health screening for Medicaid kids in Massachusetts. There is so much wrong with this idea -- starting with the discriminatory aspect of applying it only to poor kids, the poor definitions of children's mental health problems, and my cynical sense that the benefits will all flow to the drug companies and prescribers and have little if any positive value for the kids.
But it was this thought in CP&P that got me to think more about the issue, past my outrage, that is:
"...there is something about the interaction of science, marketing, and American culture that seems to have gone awry here."
There is a paradigm that seems now to have a stranglehold on how the culture looks at what life is supposed to be -- we are all supposed to be happy, slender, attractive, smart and successful. And anything short of that is taken as an indicator of some disease process at work. Now I know that is a gross oversimplification, but take a long look at the research that Sandy covers on Junk Food Science for a glimpse of what is so wrong with what we are being told just about food and weight.
The health care establishment (and that sounds so 60's of me, but hey, that's my era) -- the unholy alliance of pharmaceutical companies, psychiatry, insurance companies and those wanting an easily understood narrative to account for why all of us are not perfect in every way -- would have it that as a nation such things as depression, bi-polar disorder, autism, obesity, shyness, anxiety have all assumed epidemic proportions and we will soon drop like flies if we are not medicated, treated, and starved into their vision of health.
There is something in us that keeps us in thrall to a Lake Wobegone fantasy that if only we would do everything just right we would in fact be the country where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average" so we look for disorder and disease to account for any discrepancy between that fantasy and our reality. And science, too often captive to the fantasy mongers , and marketers stand ready to serve up "solutions" like mandatory screening, wildly multiplying diagnostic categories, and medications to make us look away from ourselves and what all this might mean about our lives, how we live them and who we are.
I want to think more about this because I think the meaning of it is deeply important. I am interested in what you think as well.