The issue of dressing the kids was sticky on the news last week. First, Carolyn Riley, mother of a four-year-old boy who had been diagnosed with an attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder and bipolar disorder, was convicted of second-degree murder for her daughter’s overdose with Psychiatric drugs. The next day, doctors have proposed revisions to the “bible” of psychiatry, DSM-IV, in order to reduce the number of children diagnosed as bipolar and treated with potent and dangerous antipsychotic drugs.
Although one event was certainly not the cause of the other, both of these stories fit into the master narrative that for decades has dominated our understanding of the issue of children and doctors. This fearful history of diagnosis and overmedication, perfidy and mental make-up parents, which is the basis for preserving “natural” childhood and defend a notion of human authenticity, is driven by the idea that children with nothing much evil are with Diseases often essentially fictitious disorders (the so-called ADHD), which is the first example and they have corrupted minds of unnecessary medications. That this belief has as many currencies as it does is a tragedy, because children with mental disorders are often treated without looking at a life of serious problems. It cannot be denied that psychiatric drugs can be dangerous, that they can be abused and sometimes too easily prescribed. There is no doubt that today’s childhood is full of problems, in the middle and upper classes, at least, too much pressure, too little play, too many concerns irreconcilable with academic success and future success.
But what if our fears of child corruption and drug trafficking are not really related? What if psychiatric drugs, when prescribed and reflective, can be a force for good in children’s lives? What if they penalize or deny the reality of conditions such as ADHD or bipolar disorder in childhood can actually keep children growing up in healthy adults? In recent years researchers have found that often controversial, and sometimes romantic, conditions such as depression (world-tired melancholy) and ADHD (drowsiness of a budding poet) were benign should not be for a child to be developing. Rather, they are deviations in brain development that, without treatment, feed on themselves.
The brains of children with ADHD, it has been shown, are staying in development for three to five years behind those of other children of the same age. Two-thirds of children do not overcome the disorder, and the long-term psychological effects stem from years of delay. The reason, according to John March, director of neuroscience medicine at the Duke Clinical Research Institute, is that “it is bad for the brain to be a mentally ill.” The brain grows learning. If you are a mentally ill, what your Brain is going to learn is mental illness. ”
Similarly, some experts say that anxiety caused by untreated depression and are themselves poisons in the brain in developing sources of stress that make the brain more prone to depression later in life. “If you get depressed as a child or teenager, shoot the brain,” says neuropsychologist William Stixrud. In these cases, medications are not just a way to reduce symptoms. They are potentially critical ways to protect a brain by itself. Some researchers now believe that antidepressants can boost the brain’s resilience, helping to protect it from devastating depression. Studies have shown that certain regions of the brain of children with ADHD in stimulants seem more like those of their typical developmental partners. “Gambling people are endangering the lives of American children is that drugs are neuroprotective,” he says in March. “If you reduce the symptoms of mental illness, the bet is that the brain will learn to be more normal.” Being “normal”, of course, is an important part of the problem for critics of modern psychiatry. Because, after all, should we evaluate normality when it is defined as fulfilling the requirements of unbridled culture? The problem with this argument is that nature can be cruel persecution and blind of many ideas about the natural son too bloody. Try to preach the noble beauty of honest suffering to a suicidal depression of 6 years. It is probably fair to say that he would have chosen happiness in authenticity every day.
