Honest Preacher, Tom Cruise, Bored Panda's 30 Teachers, and Chemical Imbalances

The Garrett Ashley Mullet Show

It's been several years since I first saw the 'Honest Preacher' video by YouTube channel 'Friend Dog Studios' in which a pastor wearing vestments gets up to deliver his sermon on a Sunday morning, but instead breaks down in frustration with his congregation's constant tendency toward sin and folly. He took a vow not to say who's the worst, he tells them, "but it's Dan!"

Shortly after seeing this video, we all in my household learned the hard way the importance of making your references clear before casually quoting them. My fourth son Daniel bursting into tears made that abundantly and memorably clear. Of course, I soon calmed him by explanations of the reference, plus assurances he was not the 'Dan' spoken of therein. Then we all watched the video. And though his eyes were still teary, he was smiling and laughing instead of crying by the end of it.

But imagine a scenario in which instead of admitting my error I had carted my son off to a therapist and even a psychiatrist. What sort of awful parent would I have been had I thought first to medicate him instead of helping him to understand my mistake and apologizing for it?

Along similar lines, Michael Knowles made me aware of an important medical study on his show this morning, concluding that years of heavy prescription rates of anti-depressants has no science to support the claim that these drugs are needed to regulate a chemical imbalance in our brains.

There is then nothing whatsoever backing the belief many have that they need a little help from pharmaceutical companies to manage their serotonin levels. Instead, the symptoms of other goings-on have been covered up and covered over, more or less missing the root cause in the meantime.

Therefore, it turns out Tom Cruise was nearly cancelled for nothing - or least the wrong thing. In a series of public interviews he did back in 2005, like this one with Matt Lauer on the TODAY show, Cruise urged people to look harder at the pseudoscience being used to support prescription of drugs for anxiety, depression, and attention deficit disorders. At the time, he was called insensitive, judgmental, and uninformed. It would seem he was right all along, though - at least about this.

All of this I engaged with this morning while a Bored Panda link my wife Lauren sent me yesterday was still fresh on my mind. Therein, someone had asked teachers and professors on Reddit what differences they've observed between schoolchildren from 1999, 2009, and 2019. The thirty answers highlighted show several repeating themes.

Importantly, our kids are anxious, depressed, and unable to focus - even to the point of self-harm and suicide - at levels long-time teachers can't help but remark on. Mothers and fathers meanwhile have moved on from helicopter approaches to their sons and daughters, and now are described as "lawnmower parenting." They race to remove any and all obstacles and challenges from their children's path to the point that children no longer develop any resilience, but live in constant fear of making a mistake and amounting to nothing. But, hey - at least they're not as openly homophobic as they used to be.

To my mind, the overdiagnosis of ADD and ADHD is of a piece with the overuse of prescription psychopharmaceuticals and screen-time in lieu of reading to and talking with our children. At the same time, and as a result, it's no wonder our children are increasingly obese and decreasingly able to regulate their emotional state or overcome even minor setbacks and annoyances.

The hearts of fathers need to be turned back to these children.

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