Ritalin and company

There is a growing care among parents to accept Ritalin prescriptions for their children. This is encouraging, but it is not enough. Hillary Clinton once was said to be alarmed by the use of anti depressants in USA children. But this is also not enough. We need new Spinozas, we need new challenging approaches to the supposed "depression" entity as such. It surely exists as a modern symptom, as surely as ADHD in children. But it is also surely linked to language, to our modern form of life, which gives more credit to instant jouissance than to careful designed discourse. Spinoza said that sadness is a kind of moral defficiency. A couple of years ago I read a revision in Scientific American of a book by Antonio Damasio, the well-known neurologist, on Spinoza. This lady asked herself: "but who reads Spinoza today?" Well, we need more Spinozas, not only more readers of Spinoza.