Whatever-ville

With the recent school shootings in Minnesota, the omnipresent news stories about alleged teenage delinquency, and the various popular TV shows about independent upper class youth run amuck, it’s no wonder our culture is obsessed with asking: “what’s wrong with these kids?”

The newest round of commentary comes from noted youth and crime expert Elliott Currie. His new book, The Road to Whatever makes an attempt to address what Salon magazine calls, “the epidemic of checked-out, drug-taking middle-class teens.”

Currie built the book around a number of interviews with youth, both in the throws of addiction and in recovery. He chose to write about teens whom had a pre-existing rapport with, and you can tell he spoke to them each several times, at different stages in their addiction/recovery cycles. Through this process, Currie eventually arrives at what he believes to be the real crux of the issue – “carelessness,” or the idea that, for many troubled teens, “you really, truly don’t care what happens to you – you don’t care whether you live or die. You don’t care what happens to anybody else, either.”

Currie’s believes that our society is gradually hardening. This means more parents are throwing their teenagers out when they misbehave, while teachers often turn blind eye to the real problems. Abandoned by parents, youth like those Currie spoke to end up isolated and nihilistic.

Ultimately, Currie argues that the disappearance of pro-social government and cultural programs benefiting troubled youth, and a general societal “sink or swim” mentality toward kids is the problem. As the author puts it, these teens are the victims of “a world of narrow, self-serving individualism in which real support from ... adults is rare and punishment and self-righteous exclusion are routine.” He adds, “it is a world that places high expectations for performance on adolescents but does remarkably little to help them do well.”

Currie’s found that when troubled teens do seek help, they’re often simply given medication – rather than encouraged to speak and to talk about their problems. One of the subjects interviewed described visiting a psychiatrist a mere three times before being handed a prescription. She says,

“The first time I went in there, I said, “I’m depressed, I’d like to take some pills.” He just asks me about my symptoms. He goes, “OK, so you’re depressed. All right, do you feel this?” “No.” “Do you need to sleep?” “Yeah.” So he gave me some sleeping pills and some Prozac. Boom, that was it.

Rarely, Currie illustrates, do teens get the support they need to keep from abusing the prescriptions. The young woman above adds, “The sleeping pills were a bad idea, because I ended up taking a lot of those.”

Currie’s sources also describe feeling ignored and underestimated at school. One student, Zach, talked about going from being an “A” student, to eventually drop out. He says,

“I used to win championships and shit like that all. It was cool. Doing all that shit with science fairs. Whatever, you know what I’m saying? …Schools became boring to me. They couldn’t teach me nothing new ... And then I just started doing drugs ... then I just couldn’t keep up ‘cause it wasn’t no point [sic] to do homework if you was never in class.”

When Zach was in class, his teachers were often consciously aware of the problem. Instead of addressing it, he says they would tell him, “put your head down and go to sleep.” Most of the students interviewed described similar experiences. More often than not, they were shuttled off to alternative schools (where their problems often continued) or expelled. In some cases the teens dropped out on their own. Ignored by a system that favor more “promising” students, they decided to ignore the system right back.