I’m not a fan of competition. It brings out the worst in people, while trying to bring out the best. So of course I have difficulty understanding athletes using steroids or doping just to win a contest. These drugs have possible health consequences after all. For the athlete, I’m sure they believe it’s about achievement and maximized potential, but it’s driven by trying to be better than the other guy. The bar is set by another person.
With that drive they are willing to do “whatever it takes.” Train more. Work harder. We as spectators encourage it and set up an environment that doesn’t reward holding back. Those that hold back anything that might enhance their performance don’t last too long in competitive sports. Once someone else becomes the standard to be matched or exceeded, they determine the bar for “normal.” Anything less is unacceptable.
In society we have a name for functioning below the level of “normal.” We call it impairment. As a psychiatrist I am supposed to intervene when someone has a mental impairment. Physicians usually define normal as the range of functioning of the average person in society. Not having enough energy to get regular activities done is an impairment. As society pushes people to pursue one’s “full potential,” expectations shift up for “normal.” People view normal by unnaturally high standards, and feel disappointment if they don’t meet it. Performance enhancement becomes common, normal, and expected.
When I was twenty-two years old, I did my job with five hours sleep and little to eat. That was normal then. Now in my thirties I need three cups of coffee to get the same amount of work done if I’m sleep deprived. I view it as necessary and justified since the work needs to get done. It’s normal. In medicine we’ve trained ourselves to maximize functioning without sleep, because it’s expected of us.
While it’s possible that my medical training has skewed my view of athletes, college students don’t seem to find performance-enhancing drugs in athletes acceptable either. Last year, in a study in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, authors Dodge et al., found that college students viewed such athletes as “cheaters.” These same college students, though, believed it was all right to abuse stimulant medications (not prescribed) to do better academically. They did not consider that misuse of stimulants to be cheating. The more they themselves had abused stimulants, the more judgmental they felt about athletes. Stimulant abuse is rampant in colleges, with students attempting to enhance their academic performance. If their classmates are using them and scoring better on tests, the bar is raised, and a new “normal” is set.
I routinely have patients who come to me asking if they have ADHD. More of the time they insist that they have it. They insist because they’re sure they have attention problems. Or because they tried their friend’s Adderall and were “able to focus so much better.” In their minds, improvement on a drug must indicate a diagnosis and thus an explanation for the difficulties. I even have parents of patients who presume that the lack of A’s must indicate ADHD and insist on my prescribing stimulants. Two hundred years ago people weren’t expected to sit in a chair for eight hours a day. Today we have a diagnostic construct of ADHD. Now this isn’t to say to that ADHD doesn’t exist, as we have all seen children who really struggle with this condition. But perhaps thinking about our expectations reveals the slippery slope that leads to overdiagnosis.
As we’ve stumbled upon many ways to “enhance” functioning, to maximize what we can do with our bodies and minds, the bar shifted on normal. We expect people to perform at that new level. If they can’t, it must indicate a deficit. Such a progression leads to less and less tolerance for any impairment, distress, or problem. In the end, this is really about performance at all costs, masked in the pretense of “treatment.” In 2008 a group of eminent scientists published a commentary in the journal Nature, calling for regulation to allow “cognitive enhancers,” namely open use of stimulants to improve brain function in the average person. Implicit in their argument is a goal to “call a spade a spade.” In that argument, people use drugs to do better at tasks, so let’s call it what it is. I reserve an opinion on the matter.
It’s easy to have perspective on something we ourselves are not doing. Once we have incorporated it into our routine, we develop rationale to justify it. I can understand how the college student thinks “athletes shouldn’t use drugs to win at sports, but keep your hands off my Adderall.” Personally I believe students shouldn’t use ADHD drugs they aren’t prescribed to do better on tests. It’s wrong for them to misuse drugs just to be able to take tests.
Just don’t take away my coffee. I need my coffee.
