On this blog and in my new book, Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up, I explore young people’s experiences with medication. And oftentimes, by exposing their ambivalence, even their resentment, toward their treatment from an early age, I end up implicitly questioning the value of early intervention for mental illness.

So in honor of the American Psychological Association’s Mental Health Month Blog Party Day, I want to address the question of whether I think early intervention is worth it.

How many kids take medications for mental health problems in the U.S. these days?

It’s a simple question, and one I’ve been getting asked a lot lately as I’ve been interviewed about my new book, Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up, about coming of age on psychiatric drugs.

And I’ve been embarrassed to hem and haw and not to have a single, easy answer.

Because here’s the thing: There are a lot of piecemeal stats from a lot of different sources, but they vary wildly, and there’s no single, unassailable source.

In this blog, I have been writing about different facets of “the experience of medication” in young people who take psychiatric drugs for a variety of conditions.

I’m going to continue to do that, because there are many more topics I want to discuss (please feel free, as always, to make suggestions in the comments section if there are particular subjects you’d like me to write about).

However, if you’d like to read an account of what got me interested in this subject in the first place, you might want to check out the excerpt from my new book, Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up, which is over at Salon.com.

In the ever-fraught public discussion of kids and psychiatric medication, the proper role of school administrators and teachers often comes up. What teachers should or shouldn’t say to parents about medication treatment for their students is an understandably touchy subject.

Many parents are wary of being told to medicate their child because an overwhelmed teacher “can’t deal” or because medication would be cheaper than providing special services.

Teachers and administrators, though, are are in their own bind. They may have opinions about what would be best for the kid – going on a drug for the first time, adjusting a dosage, trying a new out-of-school therapy – but they are also wary of meddling.

The subject is so delicate that at one point about a decade ago, a number of states even passed resolutions seeking to ban teachers from mentioning medications to parents.

Ten years later, the landscape has shifted a little, partly because of the demographics of the teacher workforce. Many of today’s young teachers were yesterday’s medicated kids.

In my last post, I asked what it means for your “illness identity” when you take a medication that manages your psychiatric problems so that they go away or are no longer problematic. “Does a formerly “severe” mental illness become “mild” or “moderate”?” I asked “Does it disappear entirely?”

It’s often said that these disorders can’t be cured – they can just be managed. Medications are one way of managing them. But the fact is, few people like taking psychiatric drugs. They have unpleasant side effects, they get us deemed “weak” or make us feel like we’re leaning on a crutch, they even change our identity and sense of self.

Therefore, we need a reason to keep taking what we’ve been prescribed. A diagnosis and, more specifically, the presence of troubling symptoms, serve as the justification. The irony, though, is that once these troubling symptoms go away, it’s hard to see why the drugs are still warranted.

What do you do when the drugstore is out of your medication refills? Well, if you’ve remembered to refill before you’ve run out entirely, it’s usually no big deal – you can wait or go elsewhere.

The problems come when the drug is a) a controlled substance and b) the powers that be have controlled availability of the active ingredient a little too zealously, so that it’s in short supply, even for the pharmacies. This is the problem causing millions of people a lot of angst as they try to procure their stimulant drugs for ADHD in the face of a continuing national shortage.

Preparing to write this post, I started to survey the media coverage of the latest report from pharmacy giant Medco on how many Americans are taking psychiatric medications. The straight news coverage was okay, but many others simply used the report as a chance to declare - again -that Americans are “overmedicated.”

I don’t see how you can you honestly declare that a whole country, or even any particular group, is “overmedicated” unless you can also determine what number would constitute “appropriately medicated.” Not surprisingly, few people sounding off on either this report or the larger issue are willing to make such a call.