In 1994, my mom was told that I wasn't performing well in school because I had some sort of defect. She was told to take me to a building where doctors ran tests on me, giving her the news that I had something called "Attention Deficit Disorder," and that if I was going to actually do well in school and thus live a normal life, I needed to be medicated.
My mother did what she thought was right, but what she didn't know was that she was just one in millions who were being scammed by drug companies and school districts. It was really easy to do, too. Concerned parents just had to be told there was something wrong with their child, and it was even easier to do if that child was a boy.
Girls are far better at navigating the outdated, factory-focused school systems that most public schools rely on. They can sit still for longer periods, listen more intently, and they even test better. If you're a school getting financial kickbacks for higher test scores, then boys are a complication. Moreover, if your school is being incentivized to have special programs for students with learning disabilities, as 36 states did, then getting ADD diagnosed kids was a lucrative venture.
I was a 10-year-old boy being treated like a defective girl. I was standing in the way of a public school making more money, and as such, I had to be drugged into something far more useful. It wasn't until years later that I understood that I was being used. They lied to my mother. Scared her into dosing her child with medications they told her would help me be "normal," despite having no idea what the long-term effects would be.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should. Before the jab, before "gender-affirming care," there was Vitamin R, one of the most egregious scams forced on the public, and particularly children, that was never fully addressed until decades later.
Not that people haven't looked back with outrage, but it's been swallowed up with time. A shame, too, because the Ritalin scam could have been a solid lesson to inform us of just how far institutions and establishments are willing to go just to get money and control.
But now that we've gotten through the "pandemic," and "gender-affirming care" is starting to die off, are the legacy media and various scientists willing to admit that things weren't what they should've been. In a recent New York Times Magazine piece titled "Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?" we opened Pandora's Box and, at this point, it's gone too far to close.
As the piece notes, more people than ever are on some sort of psychotropic medication. From 2012 to 2022, A.D.H.D. medications have shot up 58 percent. The primary target for this medication always has been, and still remains, boys:
Despite the questions these scientists have begun to raise, the growth of the diagnosis shows no signs of stopping or even slowing down. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 11.4 percent of American children had been diagnosed with A.D.H.D., a record high. That figure includes 15.5 percent of American adolescents, 21 percent of 14-year-old boys and 23 percent of 17-year-old boys. Seven million American children have received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, up from six million in 2016 and two million in the mid-1990s.
The kicker is that, the drugs do create more focus, but as studies went on there is no sign of greater learning:
A Florida researcher named William Pelham Jr. found something similar in a study published in 2022. Unlike the Australian study, this one involved not adults but children ages 7 to 12, all attending an eight-week summer camp for kids with A.D.H.D. Their days were split between classroom learning and regular camp activities. Pelham and his colleagues randomly divided the children into a treatment group and a control group. The treatment group got a regular daily dose of the active ingredient in Ritalin, and the control group was given a placebo.
As with the Australian study, the children taking Ritalin worked faster and behaved better in the classroom than those in the placebo group. But again, they didn’t learn any more than the control group. “Although it has been believed for decades that medication effects on academic seatwork productivity and classroom behavior would translate into improved learning of new academic material,” the scientists wrote, “we found no such translation.”
This is absolutely true. There is no long-term benefit for using the drug when it comes to learning, but the point wasn't learning, it was testing well. On these psychotropics, you're more likely to focus on what you're reading, absorbing it, then answering questions about it, but after a few weeks, what you learned fades like everything else does.
But in the short term, it can have help you understand and up your grades. Better grades can mean more money for schools with incentive programs. What happens to the child after that isn't important.
This is pretty common across the board. How much of your schooling do you actually retain if it's not in common use in your everyday life? The brain has better use for things you're involved in regularly, so it shunts a lot of that useless knowledge to the back, if not out, but I digress.
The point is that the system told children and parents there was something wrong with people, but in truth, it was the system that's been wrong all along. For something created by people and for people, the system we have is very dehumanizing. Whether it's government, corporations, or various institutions, it's always looking to make people "better," but what is "better" is always viewed through the lens of making that system's job easier and more lucrative.
Boys are one of modern society's greatest victims because nearly every system sees them as an issue that needs to be solved. Schools saw boys as a problem because they didn't test as well as girls or behave in a manner that made the education system's goals easier to obtain. The government sees men as a problem because they're typically more independent-minded and pose the greatest threat to true authoritarian power. Corporations see men as a complication because they're not as easy to sell to as women, and in an effort to sell more to women, they belittle the man and empower the woman.
Modernity and men are not good bedfellows, and this is recognized very early on in a male's life. The attempt to curb these issues starts early, and the psychotropic boom of the 90s was one such attempt, and it was one that I was caught up in.
To this day, my view on pharmaceutical companies, establishments, and especially public schools, remains highly prejudiced. These companies didn't care about me, the school certainly didn't either. I was diagnosed with a mental issue, but in reality, the only "issue" I had... was that I was a boy who did boy things.
It's not boys who need to change, it's the system that needs to. No matter which system it is, it needs to make allowances for humanity to act naturally instead of trying to control it and force it into something it's not. If schools are having trouble with boys, then schools need to change. There's no argument to be had.
If the solution to an issue is "shove this psychotropic down your throat" then the issue isn't likely with you. It's a system trying to get you to fit into a box it created.
