there is a kind of interesting very minor strand in there, which is how much the amount of ADHD drugs people take in the US affects all of these online cultures and that kind of thing. it's probably been covered on here before i guess.
A few years back I read one of Brett Easton Ellis's later books and the protagonist had a child or children - and as a result of that there were lots of scenes with his kid and the school he/she attended and so on. And a big part of that is the meds that the kids are on, sort of like a running joke in the way that in American Psycho he always describes everyone's clothes in forensic detail. Here he doesn't go into detail in the same way but the point is that all the kids are on meds; uppers or downers or some kind of behavioural things. Presumably they did something a bit naughty once and their parents panicked and put them on something that would stop them doing that - and then something else to deal with the side-effects of that first thing and then cos they are already on a couple of things when someone something else that will improve their sleep then it's not a big jump to go for that... and then something to wake them up in the morning follows quite naturally.
Anyway, my point is that I was interested to read about this cos It was something that I had heard about or at least had heard allusions to, the way that normal children's behaviour was being treated as a serious mental health issue and being dealt with by medication. And similarly the smart pills for students, energy drugs for workers who need to schmooze/party all night and then be at the office bright eyed and bushy tailed next morning.
From what I'd heard it felt that there were loads of legal drugs being used in all walks of life - from kids given speed for their alleged ADHD all the way up to Trump and his well publicised adderall addiction. And so I thought it was something that would be in every book that I read after that - I'm not asking for books About legal drugs, I'm just saying that the impression that I get is that it should be something that is mentioned in books set in the modern US, not where the focus is but just part of the scenery of the world in which any modern story takes place. But... that hasn't really happened, maybe I've been reading the wrong books or watching the wrong telly/films... or maybe this issue has just gone away (seems unlikely) but I just don't see it mentioned as much as I had expected to... I had thought that that BEE book was going to be the vanguard of a whole sort of wave of books dealing at least tangentially or obliquely with this topic, but it hasn't happened. Or has it? I dunno, help me out guys. Tell me what''s going on here.
