Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 18 June
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
These days, classrooms seem packed with children who report to the office to take medication at lunchtimes – or whose behaviour problems come with labels that didn’t exist when their parents were young. Kids who can’t sit still have ADHD, kids with trouble making friends have Asperger’s Syndrome, and even cleverness comes with a measurable label: Gifted.
When did eccentricity, naughtiness and other behaviours become medicalised, rather than part of the normal variation of human behaviour? Do all these categories help more than they hinder? And why are asthma, autism and allergies all on the rise? Divisions are everywhere – on whether the rise in childhood ailments is due to better detection, environmental contaminants or a blend of both; and on whether medication is an answer, and if so, how soon (and how much).
Our speakers will take the pulse of the situation – and offer competing diagnoses to get to the heart of the problem. Wheeler Centre director Michael Williams will chair the debate.
Speakers for the proposition are:
Jane Caro – author, broadcaster and award-winning advertising writer
Martin Whitely – recently retired WA politician, teacher and author of Speed Up and Sit Still: The Controversies of ADHD
Jon Jureidini – child psychiatrist, Professor in psychiatry and paediatrics at Adelaide University and spokesman for Healthy Skepticism
Speakers against the proposition include:
Nicole Rogerson – CEO of Autism Awareness Australia and director of the Lizard Children’s Centre
Katie Allen – paediatric gastroenterologist and allergist in the field of Food Allergy at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital and co-author of Kids' Food Allergy for Dummies
Jane Burns – public health academic and advocate, and CEO of Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre
Tweet at this event: #iq2oz
Intelligence Squared Debates
The Wheeler Centre and St James Ethics Centre combine again in 2013 to bring you a brand new series of Intelligence Squared debates.
Established in 2002, IQ2 has spread across the globe, bringing the traditional form of Cambridge and Oxford Unions-style debating – with two sides proposing and opposing a sharply formed motion – to Melbourne Town Hall.
Featuring
Michael Williams
Michael Williams is the editor of The Monthly. He was previously the Artistic Director of Sydney Writers’ Festival. He has spent the past decade at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne as its ...
Nicole Rogerson
Nicole Rogerson is the CEO of Autism Awareness Australia and director of the Lizard Children’s Centre. She is a frequent public speaker on autism and often appears in the media advocating for families with children on the spectrum. She is a passionate advocate for evidence-based interventions and funding support for ASD children and adults.
Nicole left a career in marketing and public Relations in 1999 when her son was diagnosed with autism. She established the Lizard Centre in 2003, now Australia’s largest and most respected provider of early intervention programs for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
Nicole is also the founding Director and CEO of Autism Awareness Australia, a national not-for-profit organisation providing national education programs that promote understanding of ASD, and supporting and advocating for the needs of individuals on the spectrum and their families.
Nicole sat on the federal government’s Autism Advisory Board and continues to work for better access and government support for evidence-based intensive early intervention programs for children with autism. She has presented her work at the United Nations in New York, in 2011 and 2013.
Jon Jureidini
Jon Jureidini is a child psychiatrist at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, Adelaide where he works with ill and disabled children and their families. He has also trained in philosophy and psychotherapy, but learned most of what he knows about psychiatry by growing up in a pub, having three daughters, and from novels and Leunig cartoons.
Jon is a professor in the disciplines of psychiatry and paediatrics at the University of Adelaide. He is spokesman for Healthy Skepticism, an organisation devoted to countering misleading drug promotion, and chair of Australian-Palestinian Partnerships for Education and Health (appeh.org.au).
His interests include quality use of medicines, suicide, medical education and child abuse. He has been a strong critic of Australia’s reckless immigration detention policies and has worked with many children and adults damaged by those policies. He has a disabling addiction to Australia rules football.
Martin Whitely
Martin Whitely is a recently retired WA politician, teacher and author of Speed Up and Sit Still: The Controversies of ADHD. Martin made tackling what he terms the ‘ADHD Industry’ a major focus of his parliamentary work.
When Martin was elected to State Parliament in 2001, WA’s child ADHD prescribing rates were approximately three times the national average. Martin was successful in tightening WA’s prescribing accountability measures.
Subsequently Perth’s per-capita child prescribing rate and its teenage amphetamine abuse rate have fallen 50%.
Martin also highlighted conflict of interest issues that saw the draft Australian ADHD treatment guidelines abandoned and replaced by what he describes as more balanced process. He is currently completing a PhD on ‘ADHD and Regulatory Capture’ and volunteering with a ‘cash starved’ non-profit group he established called Drug Free Attention Difficulties Support.
Jane Caro
Jane Caro AM is a Walkley Award-winning Australian columnist, author, novelist, broadcaster, advertising writer, documentary maker, feminist and social commentator.
Jane appears frequently on Q&A, The Drum and Sunrise. She has created and presented five documentary series for ABC's Compass, airing in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. She and Catherine Fox present a popular podcast with Podcast One, Austereo 'Women With Clout'. She writes regular columns in Sunday Life.
She has published twelve books, including Just a Girl, Just a Queen and Just Flesh & Blood, a young adult trilogy about the life of Elizabeth Tudor, and the memoir Plain Speaking Jane. She created and edited Unbreakable which featured stories women writers had never told before and was published just before the Harvey Weinstein revelations. Her most recent non-fiction work is Accidental Feminists, about the fate of women over 50. The Mother is her first novel for adults.
View Profile
Katie Allen
Professor Katie Allen is a Paediatric Gastroenterologist and Allergist practising in the field of Food Allergy at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne.
She is Director of the Population Health, Genes and Environment Research Theme at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, and is Principal Investigator of the HealthNuts Study which is tracking 5300 infants to try and understand the cause of the new food allergy epidemic. She has published extensively with more than 120 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, and is co-author of a new book, Kids' Food Allergy for Dummies.