A Note From A Child Psychiatrist

By Elizabeth J. Roberts
Sunday, October 8, 2006

I have been treating, educating and caring for children for more than 30 years, half of that time as a child psychiatrist, and the changes I have seen in the practice of child psychiatry are shocking. Psychiatrists are now misdiagnosing and overmedicating children for ordinary defiance and misbehavior. The temper tantrums of belligerent children are increasingly being characterized as psychiatric illnesses.

Using such diagnoses as bipolar disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Asperger's, doctors are justifying the sedation of difficult kids with powerful psychiatric drugs that may have serious, permanent or even lethal side effects.

There has been a staggering jump in the percentage of children diagnosed with a mental illness and treated with psychiatric medications. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2002 almost 20 percent of office visits to pediatricians were for psychosocial problems -- eclipsing both asthma and heart disease. That same year the Food and drug Administration reported that some 10.8 million prescriptions were dispensed for children -- they are beginning to outpace the elderly in the consumption of pharmaceuticals. And this year the FDA reported that between 1999 and 2003, 19 children died after taking prescription amphetamines -- the medications used to treat ADHD. These are the same drugs for which the number of prescriptions written rose 500 percent from 1991 to 2000.

Some psychiatrists speculate that this stunning increase in childhood psychiatric disease is entirely due to improved diagnostic techniques. But setting aside the children with legitimate mental illnesses who must have psychiatric medications to function normally, much of the increase in prescribing such medications to kids is due to the widespread use of psychiatric diagnoses to explain away the results of poor parenting practices. According to psychiatrist Jennifer Harris, quoted in the January/February issue of Psychotherapy Networker, "Many clinicians find it easier to tell parents their child has a brain-based disorder than to suggest parenting changes."

Parents and teachers today seem to believe that any boy who wriggles in his seat and willfully defies his teacher's rules has ADHD. Likewise, any child who has a temper tantrum is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. After all, an anger outburst is how most parents define a "mood swing." Contributing to this widespread problem of misdiagnosis is the doctor's willingness to accept, without question, the assessment offered by a parent or teacher.

What was once a somber, heart-wrenching decision for a parent and something children often resisted -- medicating a child's mind -- has now become a widely used technique in parenting a belligerent child. As if they were debating parental locks on the home computer or whether to allow a co-ed sleepover, parents now share notes with each other about whose child is taking what pill for which diagnosis.

These days parents cruise the Internet, take self-administered surveys, diagnose their children and choose a medication before they ever set foot in the psychiatrist's office. If the first doctor doesn't prescribe what you want, the next one will.

There was a time in the profession of child psychiatry when doctors insisted on hours of evaluation of a child before making a diagnosis or prescribing a medication. Today some of my colleagues in psychiatry brag that they can make an initial assessment of a child and write a prescription in less than 20 minutes. Some parents tell me it took their pediatrician only five minutes. Who's the winner in this race?

Unfortunately, when a child is diagnosed with a mental illness, almost everyone benefits. The schools get more state funding for the education of a mentally handicapped student. Teachers have more subdued students in their already overcrowded classrooms. Finally, parents are not forced to examine their poor parenting practices, because they have the perfect excuse: Their child has a chemical imbalance.

The only loser in this equation is the child. It is the child who must endure the side effects of these powerful drugs and be burdened unnecessarily with the label of a mental illness. Medicating a child, based on a misdiagnosis, is a tragic injustice for the child: His or her only advocate is the parent who lacked the courage to apply appropriate discipline.

Well-intentioned but misinformed teachers, parents using the Internet to diagnose their children, and hurried doctors are all a part of the complex system that drives the current practice of misdiagnosing and overmedicating children. The solution lies in the practice of good, conscientious medicine that is careful, thorough and patient-centered.

Parents need to be more careful with whom they entrust their child's mental health care. Doctors need to take the time to understand their pediatric patients better and have the courage to deliver the bad news that sometimes a child's disruptive, aggressive and defiant behavior is due to poor parenting, not to a chemical imbalance such as bipolar disorder or ADHD.

The writer is a child and adolescent psychiatrist in California and the author of "Should You Medicate Your Child's Mind?"

What is Love?

Slow down for three minutes to read this. It is so worth it. Touching words from the mouth of babes. What does Love mean? A group of professional people posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds,

"What does love mean?"


The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined. See what you think:

"When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore.

So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love."

Rebecca- age 8

"When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth."

Billy - age 4

"Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other."

Karl - age 5

"Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs."

Chrissy - age 6

"Love is what makes you smile when you're tired."

Terri - age 4

"Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy
and she takes a sip before giving it to him,
to make sure the taste is OK."

Danny - age 7

"Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing,
you still want to be together and you talk more.

My Mommy and Daddy are like that.
They look gross when they kiss"

Emily - age 8

"Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas, if you stop opening
presents and listen."

Bobby - age 7 (Wow!)

"If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who
you hate,"

Nikka - age 6

(we need a few million more Nikka's on this planet)

How Proud Are You Of Your Country?

By George Paxinos
2-18-9
 If we do nothing now, if we do not see the link between what is happening to everyone on the economic front and on the crowded streets of the destitute, lined by clusters of empty shops, between which cower the huddled masses of women and children left homeless and penniless while their menfolk are dragooned off to an oil cartel's "Never-Ending War on 'Terror'" for their corporate fun and profit and for the furtherance of the jackbooted State-Terror of the New World Order's Globalist State-Fascist Agenda, if we cannot make the connection from conditions in our home society to those happening to forgotten individuals held incommunicado on the Dark Side away from the light of life in secret places like Gitzmo, Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray, Abu Ghuraib Torture and Interrogation Camp in Iraq, Bagram Torture Facility in Afghanistan, then not only will we never be able to look ourselves in the mirror again with anything like a clear conscience, but we ourselves, our families and our loved ones, will soon enough land in home-side versions of those same camps. 
  
Read below what America has become, Dick Cheney, a clipped-wing bird-hunter, who approved the crushing of a child's testicles : read here : 
  
"I feel sick to my stomach as I write this. 
  
This morning I read the interview with the former Guantanamo guard who describes in excruciating detail how Gitmo prisoners were allegedly subjected to anal rape as well as other forms of sexual abuse, torture, humiliation, and other atrocities, all at the hands of their U.S. captors, in some cases under the supervision of U.S. medical personnel. It is a ghastly account." 
  
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seery/cheney-chief-of-churls_b_167451.html 
  
"Dick Cheney -- the clipped-wing bird hunter -- as the poster boy of U.S. sadism. He became the bragging ringleader for policies that exceeded the bounds of respectable military strategy (and/or domestic partisanship) in order to inflict special psychological damage on all perceived adversaries [...] the insistence on waterboarding; the indecent disdain for the Geneva Conventions; the Plamegating of critics; the spying without warrant; the legal approval for squeezing a child's testicles : [...] ... 
  
"In several public fora heretofore, Yoo has insisted that no law -- neither domestic nor international -- prevents the president from authorizing the crushing of a child's testicles or the raping of an infant as a way of exerting pressure upon a terrorist suspect." 
  
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seery/testicles_b_109687.html 
  
  
Former Gitzmo Guard Tells All : 
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004409 
  
DOJ Report on Yoo/Bybee Torture Memos 'Damning' : 
http://www.pubrecord.org/torture/687-doj-probe-on-yoo-torture-memos 
  
I am not going to write more regarding America's fate if it does nothing to stop these atrocities, nor about the way America will go down in history as a far, far worse Fascist Regime than Nazi Germany ever was; from now on in, it is up to you to do this -- for yourselves. 
  
Even here in Switzerland I am under observation by obscure security services probably not Swiss for writing articles like this one, I have found two professional bugs planted in my tiny apartment by persons and agencies unknown, and calling Swiss Intelligence and complaining seems to have surprised them as much as it had me : these obscure agencies or persons can most probably only be acting from British or American sources, and they are acting illegally on Swiss Territory, to promulgate the goals of their New World Order against the laws of my new home country, or else there are politicians in our midst who are turncoats and traitors to our country, lapdogs of the NWO, whose only goal, it would appear, is to share in the bloody-handed ghoul-feast of the ultra-rich, be they only small scavenger buzzards, themselves. 
  
I am now a Swiss, and if Switzerland was ever lacking in Wilhelm Tells, if he was indeed only a figment of Schiller's imagination, then at least there is one in this country now. If the New World Order wants a fight, then they have got one. But not by Tell's Second Arrow -- he was a gentleman; I am not. 
  
Compared to docile Americans, British and Continental Europeans, I am of South African birth and Greek and Boer extraction, and now the spiritual, if not the genetic, inheritor of the spirit of Wilhelm Tell; if others do not want to fight for the freedoms of themselves and their families, and fight the destruction of their countries and basic human decency, then I shall at least defend those that Switzerland might still have left. 
  
I have to shave every morning, and cannot look at that face if it were as smeared with the blood of innocents, as those politicians of ours who allowed CIA Torture Flights to land at some of our airports in transit from one US camp to another. 
  
May God Almighty fry all those lap-dog politicians in Hell. 
  
George