Writing -- Baby Talk: Wakey wakey

The following article featured in a weekly column on parenting in the Women on Wednesday supplement of The Evening Echo, one of Ireland's leading regional daily newspapers. It appeared in the 21 July 2004 issue.

I'm sure you've heard parenting described as a full time job before now.

What a load of old nonsense! In a full-time job you have a defined start and end time, you're entitled to regular breaks and you stop for lunch. When you're looking after young children you get none of these things. Parenting is a 24/7/365 occupation that's easily more stressful, challenging and draining than any "real" job.

Even when the children finally get to bed there's no break for mum and dad: that's the only time you can attack all those things you simply can't do with the kids around. By the time you take some time to wind-down and finally crawl into bed there's precious little time left for sleep. No wonder parents with young children always seem exhausted.

In America some are turning to a drug called Provigil to help them cope with the constant tiredness. Provigil, apparently, makes you feel as if you've just had a refreshing nap even if you haven't slept at all for two days solid. Which sounds promising for parents who simply don't have enough time for a good night's sleep.

The drug was designed to help people with serious sleeping disorders avoid falling asleep at inappropriate times. However, experts are convinced that it will head down the same route as Viagra and become widely adopted as a lifestyle enhancing drug. It has already been credited with fuelling the race towards a "24 hour society" in the US. Truck drivers, students and night-clubbers are popping Provigil to stay awake through the night, while work-obsessed professionals are using the drug to cram ever more hours into the working day.

Professor Martha Farah, director of the centre for cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that the trend is set to spread to Europe. "This drug enables us to be even more workaholic and obsessed with accomplishments and productivity," she said. "It takes away the natural checks on that tendency - like the need to go to bed."

Provigil achieves annual sales of over €370 million, and about 75% of those taking it do so for non-medical reasons. It is proving an increasingly popular choice with US and usage in Britain is expected to soar over the next two years after a change in the regulations allows doctors there to prescribe Provigil for a much broader range of conditions.

Cephalon, the company that manufactures Provigil, says it's horrified by the lifestyle "abuse" of its drug, but just two years ago it was reprimanded by the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) for misleading advertising that seemed to promote its use for non-medical afflictions like tiredness, fatigue and lack of energy.

One of the main problems with Provigil is that nobody is quite sure how it works. While it is widely acknowledged that the drug has fewer side-effects than other stimulants, the truth is that the long-term effects of Provigil are unknown - a trifling fact that doesn't seem to be affecting its popularity.

There's no denying the positive effects of Provigil. Research at Cambridge University showed that young men taking Provigil became more alert, attentive and energetic, and that they performed better in tests involving short-term memory. However, Phillip Murphy, a psychologist at Lancaster University who specialises in the effects of drugs on human behaviour, warns against the wholesale use of such drugs. "If you are so busy you haven't got time for sleep you should change your life - not take a drug," he suggests.