Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
None (well, some footage of Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold)
Directed By:
Kevin P. Miller
Back when I was a kid, medication for youth was starting to get trendy, but for the most part, kids were being left alone to figure life out. But my mom being a retired first grade teacher, I heard many stories of disturbing kids being put on Ritalin, so they could stop being a bother to the others. Sports and discipline became a complex and length alternative to a quick pill. GENERATION RX is looking back on the idea of giving kids medication like Ritalin or even the very adult Zoloft. Because there is perspective to be gained, things happened since drugs have started being distributed to children, some died, some killed themselves and some even became murderers. While GENERATION RX lacks production value and a solid editing to be compelling and efficient, it's raising an important and difficult question. What the fuck have we done to our kids?
So what most of the behavior regulating drugs to, is that they limit the influx of information that goes through to your frontal lobe. This is the part of the brain that makes you a human being. It's the part of your brain that manufactures your emotions and personality. Your frontal lobe is where your soul sits. That's the part that gets cut off when somebody gets lobotomized. There is a terrible track record of what those drugs do to the still forming teenage mind. Eric Harris, one of the two Columbine shooters, was on antidepressants. While he was a troubled kid to begin with, shutting down his emotional core with medication might have been the final straw that pushed him to such a destructive spree. GENERATION RX traces back a lot of these issues of young minds going crazy and chaotic after being put on medication. There are a lot of those and I'm sure they just quoted a few. One of the most striking was the story of young Candace, who wasn't even a teenager yet. She hanged herself about twenty-four hours after being put on Zoloft. That drug is so potent, it managed to destroy a young girl in a single day.
Now the question that remains is: Who the fuck ever thought it was a good idea to medicate kids in the first place? The people that sell medication. For them, it's just another market for their product. As long as money comes in, who cares about the rest. GENERATION RX investigates that angle too and shows evidence of how the drug companies sold the idea to the masses that their kids were sick. From the grants they gave to doctors to this...hold on this is pretty good...to some coloring books that told story that if they felt sad, it was because they were diseased. They show a coloring book where a young kangaroo was sad his friend moved away, but Doctor Bear gave him a medicine and then he was fine. Is it me or friends move away all the goddamned time? If you start taking medication at a very young age instead of learning how to cope with something not all that sad, what kind of coping mechanism will you develop as an adult when you're going to face issues like death of a loved one?
While it's raising alarming questions and doing a remarkable job at doing so, but it's suffering from terrible presentation issues. Remember those classrooms documentaries they made you watch in school on a beat up VHS tape? With an annoying voice-over narrator and corny infographics and images of children opening their arms in front of the sun. That kind of crap. The editing could have used a do-over also, because the information is presented in a chaotic fashion at times. It's too bad because it's a movie with a purpose and that addressed urgent questions. Drugging children is a losing bet for everybody except for the person that sells the damn thing. It was so poorly put together that I had to pause it and power nap for about fifteen minutes. It's an amazing source of information, but it's not a very good movie.
SCORE: 68%