Nothing new here in this piece from the Patriot Ledger by Jacob Azerrad, but it’s a nice song to the choir against the medicalization of normal child behavior.
In a 2007 “60 Minutes” episode, Katie Couric focused on the short life of 4-year-old Rebecca 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 Rebecca’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 Rebecca 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. (read the rest here)
Oh I do need to say, I have never understood our medical model to be based on Freud’s theories. That’s news to me and I don’t agree with it. Freud came well before the chemical imbalance theories. And there are a few other things I take issue with but for the most part it’s just nice to see the massive over-medicating of our children get publicly questioned.
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Jon,
whether or not I come down seeming black and white on this stuff I always have a deep respect for people struggling with the realities of life and don’t judge people in my real life when it’s clearly a difficult circumstance…
that being said, for me, in my life, I would not use drugs for myself ever again or for any children I had…my body has been destroyed and I KNOW there are alternatives…all those struggling people out there simply don’t know and there is no reason for them to believe me…
peace to you.
From the moment one of our sons was born, we knew he was different than our other 2. He ended up being diagnosed bipolar I as a teen. As a child, we never even considered medicating him, it never entered our mind. But had a doctor proposed that treatment, it would have caught our attention. When you go several years never sleeping more than an hour at a time you’ll listen to any chance for relief.
So while I’m not comfortable with child medication, it’s easy to see all sides of this one.
Great to see this article you linked to. The enemy is us. Parents need and demand drugs to control their children. No one elected psychiatry into power, yet it decides when and what drug is appropriate for children and adults. Cause psychiatry is a science right? ha ha ha
Most people believe, that – Freudian – psychoanalysis and the medical model are almost contradictions. They aren’t. It’s true, that Freud paved the way for the – modern – medical model. (Already Aristotle proposed “mental illness” to have physical causes.) By explicitly pathologizing behavior, that “doesn’t work”, and especially by abandoning the fact, that for instance “hysteria” was caused by traumatic experiences (abuse), in favor of the idea, that it was caused by a flaw in the individual’s development (cf. th oedipal complex).
These people that are such staunch advocates for medicating children are truly sick. How a kid can get diagnosed with BP disorder at AGE THREE is just beyond me. And I can’t imagine giving my sweet, sweet boy (5) things like depakote and seroquel. Yikes.