I’ve been spending a lot of time in the car, driving hither and yon to offer my services voluntarily to organizations which I hope will one day be able to pay for them. Whiling away the hours on I-40, I’ve been listening to talk radio “the NPR kind, not the Limbaugh kind”, which I’ve never really done before. At first it made me feel a bit virtuous. “I will gain new insights into important topics” I thought, “and become a better informed American, conversant in the issues of the day” I was disabused of that notion within a few hours.
On Thursday I listened to a show discussing the controversy over prescribing antidepressants to teenagers. One guest was a clinical psychiatrist who led us to believe that merely showing a depressed teen the letters “SSRI on a piece of paper will immediately cause him or her to leap in front of a bus. The other was a psychiatrist and mouthpiece for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill “which depending on who you believe is either a stalking horse for the pharmaceutical industry, or isn’t”. She gave the impression that the only way to prevent America’s teens from topping themselves en masse is to put Prozac in the water supply, like fluoride. So now I know that if I ever have a depressed child, I will… um… give him some candy.
The greatest danger of listening to talk radio is that one day you might be in traffic and not be able to take your hands off the wheel quickly enough to change the station, and you might have to listen to one eighth of a second of “The People’s Pharmacy” I recently heard a promo for an upcoming show in which Joe and Terry will address the question, “What drives teens to have sex?” Be sure to call in with your theories.