Film Review Generation RX by Justin Orndorff

Justin Orndorff

Soc 360

Film Review #4

Generation RX

1. The Thesis:  The medical community is over prescribing our children with mild altering drugs such as, Ritalin, Prozac, and many other anti-depressants.  These drugs are the fastest growing drugs in the world and were giving them to our children.  Medical providers want the money or grants, so they overlook providing our children with simple blood tests and x-rays that may or may not lead to a diagnosis of ADHD or depression.  Some of these so called medical providers are willing to make up new diagnosis to so they can prescribe our children with anti-depressants.  I really enjoyed this documentary.
2. Main arguments that support the thesis:  Medical providers are masking our children’s personalities with anti-depressants and other mind altering drugs causing our children to commit suicide. The point is apparent that ADHD has become an immediate and simple solution to treat and diagnosis our children with drugs. The symptoms are so general that it appears any child may be diagnosed with ADHD or depression, or any other mental disorder. The film explains that most of these drugs block the neurotransmitters of the frontal lobe kind of like giving a young child a frontal lobotomy.
3. Relating the film to the course:  When you label or diagnosis a child as having ADHD you are stigmatizing that child for life.  That child is then seen as a deviant and then prejudged by his or hers peers and not accepted by the majority.  Social internalization set the norms for our society.  So by stigmatizing a child by labeling them as different hence having ADHA were saying that their different or deviant causing an uncomfortable reality for our children.  
4. Most convincing arguments of the film:  The film justifies how children need to learn the basic copping skills of life instead of just writing them a prescription.  Such as, if a child’s best friend moves away or their dog is ran over by a car and dies.  The child should learn how to deal with these situations and not just swallow a pill every time their feelings get hurt or so kind of tragedy strikes.  In the film a child is prescribed Prozac and that very same night the child stabbed his father as he lay in bed asleep.  Law officials later wanted to press attempted murder charges against the child, but the child was placed in a mental hospital and later committed suicide.
5. Least convincing arguments of the film:   There were hardly any arguments in the film that didn’t convince me that we as a nation are over medicating our children.  I really can’t say that I found anything throughout the film that made me think otherwise.
6.  Further consideration:  I think it’s quite obvious that we should put more money into studying the side effects these drugs have before we decide to distribute them to our children.  Let’s focus our attention on the FDA for a moment. The film explained that German doctors in the 1980’s found that Prozac can lead to suicide in young adults and children.   The FDA new about this deadly side effects and mislead and hide this information from the public.  Who polices the FDA? Who regulates the regulators?  Why not put a little more time and effort into overseeing the FDA and how they operate.