Childhood is not a disease

[Guest guest]

" between 1994 to 2003, there was an astounding

40-fold increase diagnosing bipolar disorder in

children. Children as young as are now

given powerful drugs not approved for children. "

The Patriot Ledger

How many more Rileys?

To diagnose a 2-year-old as bipolar by adult standards is crazy

By Azerrad

Jan 10, 2009

QUINCY ­ In a 2007 “60 Minutes” episode,

Couric focused on the short life of 4-year-old

Riley of Hull. Diagnosed with bipolar

disorder at age 3, she was dead one year later

from an overdose of a psychotropic drug cocktail.

At one point, Couric asks ’s mother, who

has been charged with her daughter’s murder, if

she thinks her child’s behavior might have been

normal. That in fact, maybe little was

just exhibiting Terrible Two’s behavior.

Couric might well ask mental health

professionals: Whatever happened to the Terrible Two’s?

We use a medical model developed by Freud, not a

behavioral model, to measure behavior. Freud

believed that if a behavior works, it’s healthy,

and if it doesn’t, it’s sick. So if a 3-year-old

is drawing inside the lines of the coloring book,

parents don’t have a thing to worry about, but if

he or she is drawing on the wallpaper, the stage

is set for a clinical diagnosis.

And there’s a pill to fix it. There are pills for

yelling, biting, throwing, kicking, cursing,

punching, name-calling and lying. There are pills

for whispering in class, for when grandma dies

and for bad habits. There are pills for daydreaming.

There’s a big difference between using medicines

to treat genuine mental illness and designing new

drugs to medicate perfectly healthy children.

Today, as the mental health industry

systematically pathologizes more and more

childhood behavior, we see a raft of drugs aimed at “curing” them.

But the medical model of behavior overshot its

target. Now it’s treating learned responses as

though they were diseases, and almost all human

behavior is based on learned responses.

Studies in the 1970s and ’80s concluded bipolar

disorder was rare in children, but between 1994

to 2003, there was an astounding 40-fold increase

diagnosing bipolar disorder in children. Children

as young as are now given powerful drugs not approved for children.

In Massachusetts alone, from 1988 to 2003, the

prescription of stimulants, antidepressants and

anti-psychotics given to children rose more than

300 percent, and the number of teenage users is even greater.

From 1993 through the first three months of last

year, 1,207 children who were given Risperdal

suffered serious problems, including 31 who died.

Among the deaths was a 9-year-old who suffered a

fatal stroke 12 days after starting therapy with Risperdal.

A key issue is the misuse of psychiatric

diagnostic labels to explain bad behavior in

children. This has resulted in the drugging of

young children to a degree unprecedented in our

history. To diagnose a 2-year-old as bipolar by adult standards is crazy.

The behavior of a 2-year-old is filled with

curiosity about everything and anything. The

young child has extraordinary ability in terms of

emotions and cognitions. They can be very upset

very quickly, very angry, very depressed, because

their emotions are so fluid, so available. When a

guy in the Terrible 50s tries to diagnose the

Terrible Two’s on an adult level, that is craziness and dangerous.

By prescribing strong medicines instead of

teaching children new choices using proven

behavioral methods, we short-circuit a child’s

learning process and, even worse, lay the tracks

for a lifetime habit of responding to challenge

and disappointment with avoidance, denial and chemical dependency.

Growing up is not a condition. Childhood is not a

disease. Children act up and defy authority and

they need adults to teach them how to manage

difficult feelings and handle disappointment appropriately.

There are ways for parents to do this that are

quite effective and don’t involve drugs, but they

do involve parents being teachers. Our preschool

children are far too young to defend themselves.

It’s up to parents to “say no to drugs” and teach

their children that life is meant to be learned

and experienced – it’s not just a pill to be swallowed.

Azerrad, a clinical psychologist in

Lexington, is the author of “From Difficult to

Delightful in Just 30 Days,” published by McGraw-Hill.

Source:

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