Barbara Sumner Burstyn: Media campaigns create world with an ill for every pill

A couple of years ago an editorial in Vanity Fair described magazine feature writers and columnists as short-term obsessives. Ever since, I've considered it a label of prestige, the perfect description for my roving mind and insatiable curiosity. But not any more. I took a test and it seems I have Adult Attention Deficit Disorder (AADD), otherwise known as Executive Function Disorder (EFD).

My husband has it, too. Between us we exhibit just about every symptom on the 60-question list. From an internal sense of anxiety, frequently misplaced car keys and reading the instructions only when all else fails, to being argumentative, keeping a messy desk and abhorring routine.

But not to worry. At great cost, science has come up with the answer: a range of medications that will modify our behaviours and make us calm and composed and above all functional in an undistracted, tidy-desk, list-making, consistent kind of way.

How did I find out I was suffering from this illness? I saw an advertisement in a magazine.

Medical advertising aimed at healthy consumers is the latest effort by pharmaceutical companies to extend their profit margins. Some call it disease mongering. Canadian researcher Barbara Mintzes calls it the medicalisation of normal human experience. The media campaigns educate people to see themselves as patients. They encourage healthy people to believe they need medical attention, in effect creating a world where there's an ill for every pill. Everything - from social phobias, the illness that used to be known as shyness, to ageing, the biggest growth sickness in the pharmaceutical world - is now a treatable illness.

It makes perfect sense. Certainly more than focusing on the truly sick who may get better or the dying who will no longer be buying, let alone impoverished, disease-ridden, developing countries. Better to maximise profits by creating new definitions and categories of illness and foisting them on to healthy consumers.

The need to recoup the costs of expensive research and development is also leading the expansion of applications for drugs. So a treatment for the sleep disorder narcolepsy is now being used as an alertness aid for healthy people. Testosterone supplements, intended for men, are being used by women to beef up their aggression in the competitive business world. Beta blockers, once the salvation of heart patients, are now used to alleviate fear under pressure.

Last year the British Medical Journal produced a Top 20 list of new non-diseases. The list included bags under the eyes, big ears, balding, grey hair, ugliness, freckles, cellulite, penis envy, road rage, loneliness and unhappiness. The number-one illness was ageing. And just last week it was revealed that over 10,000 healthy American children are taking a growth hormone for the "disease" of being short, even though the medication is not authorised for that.

Of course the pharmas deny there's any link between the increasing medicalisation of society and their perfectly pitched propaganda. They are, according to industry advocates, just providing information and helping consumers to take charge of their health.

Are they being disingenuous or do they really believe that millions of advertising dollars are somehow socially neutral?

What happens to society when the conditions of being human - being forgetful, untidy, short, bald or old are seen as disease? And what happens if in acknowledging our "illness" we choose not to fix it? Will that make those who chose to age naturally, who remain shy or vertically challenged, the pariahs of our society?

Extrapolate that to the not-too-distant future when genetic screening becomes commonplace. Will apparently healthy people be labelled "sick" decades before they become so? And how will we view those parents who decide to continue a pregnancy with a less than perfect child? And in our perfection-obsessed, diversity-intolerant society, how will that less than perfect child be received?

Of course society has, in various ways, always marginalised those who were different. But now it is the pharmas who are doing the categorising and marginalising, defining society with their marketing budgets and their surplus drugs. The result is chillingly different. In this brave new individualistic world it is the dysfunction of individuals that is highlighted, not the dysfunction of environments.

By attributing difficult behaviour or even the natural variance that is part of being human to medical disorders we obscure the political, economic, and social contributors.

I suppose I should be grateful for my AADD diagnosis. I now have an excuse for my frequent moves, the quick dispatching of husbands one and two, and my inconsistent work performance. And all along I thought the troubles were my fault, a result of my poor vertical thinking skills, my bad attitude to authority and just plain boredom. And that's where the redefinition of normal human behaviour as disease affects us all. It makes each of us both more responsible for our behaviour and profoundly less so but in all the wrong ways.

Although, once I get going on my meds I'm sure I'll notice a difference. No more procrastination-inspired creativity, no more mood swings and, finally, a tidy desk. But the question remains: will I be able to find my keys?