Children have more need of models than of critics. - Joseph Joubert (1754-1822)Chapter Index: The Discarded Child
Nothing measures the quality of a society better than how it treats its children. Nothing predicts the future of a society better than how it nurtures and educates its children. In America today, children as a group are in trouble, and psychiatry is moving in to take over. A 1990 report from the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families finds that the "discarded child" population has reached 500,000 and will soon grow to 850,000. These are children who live in detention centers, hospitals, foster homes, and mental health facilities. In many cities children are being born with drug addiction or AIDS, and many newborns are abandoned as "boarder babies" in hospitals. The root causes of discarded children are identified by the House committee as alcohol and drug abuse, homelessness, family breakup, poverty, and child abuse. Notice that none of these identified causes lie within the child in the form of genetic defects or biochemical imbalances. Driven by increasing poverty among the poorest of the poor and by the decreasing availability of low-cost housing, more and more families have been driven into the streets. It is estimated that up to one-quarter of the homeless are children. According to a 1990 report from the Columbia University National Center for Children in Poverty, five million children under six live in poverty. That's almost one in four children. Child
Abuse and Neglect
Reported figures on child abuse reveal only the tip of the iceberg. Even so, they are tragic. As summarized by Richard Gelles and Claire Cornell in Intimate Violence in Families (1990), 16 percent of children undergo some form of maltreatment each year, including abuse and neglect of a physical, sexual, or emotional nature. During 1987 over two million children were reported to state agencies for suspected neglect and abuse. The latest survey discloses 2.4 million suspected neglect and abuse cases in 1989. The U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect declares, "Each year, hundreds of thousands of children are being starved, abandoned, burned and severely beaten, raped and sodomized, berated and belittled," often by members of the family. Child maltreatment is strongly correlated with poverty. It was seven times more likely to occur in families with an income of under $15,000. Physical violence is rampant. Surveys indicate that about one in ten children is subjected to serious violence each year. Between twelve hundred and five thousand children a year die from abuse. A recent state-of-the-art survey indicates that 38 percent of women were sexually abused as children. In Secret Survivors (1990), E. Sue Blume suggests that the true rates must be even higher, because people tend to repress their childhood memories of sexual abuse and therefore cannot report them to interviewers (see chapter 12). While men report much lower rates, they typically are more ashamed of admitting to sexual victimization. Convicted pederasts often confess to molesting more boys than girls. Increasing numbers of children live in single-parent homes. Thirteen percent of white and 43 percent of black families are headed by a woman, and one-third live in poverty. Many other children are latchkey kids, with two working parents. Most people concerned with family life in America find that the modern family produces many stresses for its children. A survey of seventeen thousand parents conducted for the National Center for Health Statistics (1990) found that one in five children have emotional problems largely attributable to the breakup of the two-parent family. The most frequently troubled children are those who "experience parental divorce, were born outside of marriage, or are raised in conflict-filled families or low-income, low-education, single-parent households." They also cite possible contributions from the increasing survival of low-birth-weight babies, environmental contamination, and crack-addicted mothers. During the 1960s the schools of the nation were subjected to scorching criticism from many sources. Social critic Paul Goodman spoke of "compulsory mis-education" and former teacher John Holt asked, "Why can't Johnny read?" In 1967 and 1968, as a full-time consultant in mental health and education at NIMH, I was aware of a widely recognized crisis in education. Reform never took hold in the schools. More than two decades later, in June 1989 and then in January 1990, reports continue to confirm the escalating failure. The first was issued by the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development and the second by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the problem of minority education. They are in substantial agreement, and I'll focus on the more comprehensive one, the Carnegie report, Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century. It deals with the middle schools, where students entering their adolescence are educated. The council included business leaders, governors, university presidents and deans, school superintendents, and professors from many fields. The Carnegie Council found that seven million youths, one in four adolescents, are "extremely vulnerable to multiple high-risk behaviors and school failure," and that another seven million are "at moderate risk, but remain a cause for serious concern." It points to dramatic changes and new pressures confronting young people, including sexual promiscuity, drugs, the breakdown of social relationships in the community, and a lack of adult guidance. The report declares that the schools too often contribute to the problems of the students: A volatile mismatch exists between the organization and curriculum of middle grade schools and the intellectual and emotional needs of young adolescents. Caught in a vortex of changing demands, the engagement of many youth in learning diminishes, and their rates of alienation, substance abuse, absenteeism, and dropping out of school begin to rise.Wholly unlike the psychiatric analyses we shall examine, the report is very critical of the schools: Many large middle grade schools function as mills that contain and process endless streams of students. Within them are masses of anonymous youth. . . . Such settings virtually guarantee that the intellectual and emotional needs of youth will go unmet.The Carnegie Council makes several recommendations for transforming the schools, among them the creation of small communities of learning within the larger schools, a better core curriculum, greater attention to the students' actual educational needs, the availability of at least one concerned adult to take a special interest in each child, and the involvement of families and communities in education. My concern, however, is not with supporting one or another reform program, but with drawing attention to the society-wide stresses placed on today's children. Given the sorry state of our schools, it is no surprise that making trouble for teachers is the single most important reason that children get referred for psychological and psychiatric help. The September 1989 Clinical Psychiatry News cites a Duke University study demonstrating that "the amount of trouble that children are causing adults, particularly teachers, appears to be the driving force determining children's referrals to mental health services. " It was noted without comment that most of the children referred were "black, male, and poor." The schools have provided the mental health professions with the entering wedge for turning a large proportion of children into involuntary psychiatric consumers. Recognizing the Effects of Neglect and Abuse When I volunteered in nursery schools as a young parent, it was easy to pair up the most disturbed pupils with their parents merely by sizing up the parents as they came to pick up their children. Most children who display serious psychological or social difficulties are having serious problems at home in the form of severe conflicts between the parents or of abuse and neglect. It's usually so obvious that fifth or sixth graders are likely to put it together. "Oh, yeah, jimmy's parents are getting divorced, that's why he's so weird right now," or "Sure Joanie's freaked out; you should see her parents." But much of the abuse to which children are subjected goes unnoticed outside the family and denied within it. A variety of popular books vividly make the connection between childhood neglect and abuse and subsequent emotional problems in children and adults. Some that are good reading and easy to obtain are Jane Middleton-Moz's Children of Trauma (1989), John Bradshaw's Healing the Shame that Binds You (1988), Pia Mellody's Facing Codependency (1989), Susan Forward's Toxic Parents (1989), and E. Sue Blume's Secret Survivors (1990). Alice Miller's For Your Own Good (1983) is now a classic, and my own Psychology of Freedom (1980) also links abuse to psychological problems in children and adults. The growing public awareness of the importance of child abuse comes at exactly the moment that biopsychiatry is trying to reverse the trend by fixing the problem within the genetics and biology of the child. The Psychological Effects on Children of Abuse and Neglect A growing body of psychological research confirms the obvious-that troubled families raise a high percentage of troubled children, who go on to become troubled adults. In a professional book called Children of Battered Women (1990), Peter Jaffe and his colleagues review scientific studies demonstrating that "physical, emotional, and sexual abuse" produce children who typically get labeled with psychiatric or school-related diagnoses. Cognitive and emotional problems in children are caused not only by direct abuse, but by witnessing violence and by typical "marital discord, separation, and divorce." In The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals (1989), Lonnie Athens dramatically describes the family and group indoctrination that produces the extreme of "Insanity," the dangerous maniac who severely brutalizes other human beings. A chapter entitled "Physical and Sexual Abuse of Children," by psychiatrist Arthur H. Green in the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry (1989), discloses that all commonly diagnosed disorders of childhood can be linked to abuse and neglect. These include not only the traditional diagnoses, such as depression and anxiety, but popular school-related ones, such as attention deficit disorder (ADD), or the newer attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) [The DSM-Ill-R (1987) combines attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity to form one diagnostic category, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. The distinction is not critical for this chapter], and a variety of so-called learning disorders (LD). Green describes in detail how "pathological object relations" (avoidance and withdrawal from people), "poor self-concept and depression," and "impaired impulse control" can result from abuse. Abuse and neglect produces "difficulties in school," such as "cognitive impairment, particularly in the areas of speech and language, combined with limited attention span and hyperactivity." Furthermore he writes, "These children frequently demonstrate specific learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, expressive and receptive language disorders, and perceptual-motor problems. " In short, the whole spectrum of so-called psychiatric and psychological disorders in children can be traced to child abuse and neglect, including the latest school-related fad diagnoses. More startling, Green summarizes research indicating that the brain damage and dysfunction occasionally found in children also are related to child abuse. While the biopsychiatrist latches onto any hint of brain damage in order to point the finger at a defect in the child, someone wishing to help a child should be willing to look to the conduct of the parents and other potential abusers in the child's environment. Not only do biopsychiatrists working with children tend to deny these obvious conclusions, so do the other psychiatric contributors to the same Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry. Chapter after chapter is written about one or another "disorder" in children and adults, without connecting them in any way to childhood experiences of any kind. As if the reality behind Green's chapter did not exist, child abuse typically goes unmentioned. Instead, the so-called disorders are linked to unproven but presumed biochemical and genetic defects. Psychiatry Offers to Fill the Void The mental health professions, led by psychiatry, have rushed into the void left by the default of the family, the schools, the society, and the government. Recently NIMH announced that 20 percent of children need psychiatric care! In another pronouncement NIMH estimated that by 1990 one million children would be taking the drug Ritalin, an addictive substance used to manage difficult children with various diagnoses. Whether or not NIMH's figures reflect an actual escalation of problems among children, they unquestionably indicate the psychiatric establishment's voracious appetite for children. In blaming the child-victim, psychiatry takes the pressure off the parents, the family, the schools, and the society. By diagnosing, drugging, and hospitalizing children, psychiatry enforces the worst attitudes toward children in our culture today and exonerates those adult institutions that need reform. Psychiatry has been joined by factions within behavioral and educational psychology in exonerating the schools and blaming the children. The question asked by John Holt, "Why can't Johnny read?" has been answered, "Because he has a learning disability." We shall look first at the movement to label children ADD and hyperactive and to drug them. It originated largely out of medicine and psychiatry. Then we shall look at the LD movement, spawned mostly by psychology but now adopted by psychiatry as well. A nationally known psychiatrist affiliated with NIMH already had diagnosed ten-year-old Andy as having attention deficit disorder, indicating that he suffered from an inherent and presumably genetic and biological difficulty in focusing his attention on school work. He had no trouble focusing on video games, sports, and other things that interested him. Because he fidgeted, squirmed, and looked nervous in school, Andy also was diagnosed as hyperactive. The NIMH expert had prescribed Ritalin for Andy. Andy's mother, aghast at the idea of medicating her child, had come to me for a second opinion. Following a consultation with the parents, they dropped Andy off at my office for us to get acquainted. "He's like a bull in a china shop," his father warned me as he left. "That kid will break everything you own." I took my son's cockatiel, Sydney, out of his cage to introduce him to Andy, and abruptly he flew onto Andy's shoulder and began nipping the boy's ear. Sydney is three times the size of a parakeet and when he bites, he can draw blood. Andy didn't move. With exquisite self-control, he tolerated Sydney's directness in getting acquainted. Following my instructions exactly, Andy then raised his finger to Sydney's chest, endured a few pecks on his knuckle, stroked the bird's belly, and gently lifted him onto his finger. Outside at the old picnic table Andy explained to me that he got along fine with his mother, except he didn't listen to her very well. He couldn't explain why he gave her such a hard time. He said he didn't think his dad loved him. School was just plain boring. "Gruesome" and "d-u-m-b" was his way of putting it. Sitting there in the sunshine with this wonderful youngster, the idea of putting toxic drugs into his brain appalled me. Over the next few months, I rarely asked to see Andy. Already feeling badly about himself, he didn't need the stigma of being "the patient." Instead I worked with his parents. I explained, "Right now, your son isn't feeling loved by his dad, and he's not feeling disciplined by his mom, and he's getting very mixed messages about how to behave. The one message he is getting is that his dad doesn't love him and that he's a problem for everyone." Dad cried during our fourth session and told me that he did love his son, but he was treating him exactly like his own father had treated him. Dad's vulnerability and honesty was a good sign. Within two months, life at home was much better. I encouraged the parents to stop trying to enforce a hodgepodge of confusing rules, and instead to focus on only a very few. The main new rule for Andy was simple enough: treat your parents with respect and expect them to treat you in the same manner. This rule imposed discipline on every member of the family, including the parents, who had to learn more dignified and rational ways of communicating their own needs to their children. Previously, fear had ruled everyone, including Andy and his parents. Andy was afraid of his father; Mom and Dad, in turn, were intimidated by Andy's rebelliousness. Respect allowed for the eventual flowering of love. Andy, remember, had been diagnosed as ADD, meaning that he lacked the ability to focus his attention. The real "attention" problem Andy had was the attention he wasn't getting from his father-the good, loving attention and consistent, firm discipline he needed as a normal, energetic child. A better diagnosis for Andy was DADD-dad attention deficit disorder. Mom was also missing out on attention from Dad, causing her to express hostility toward him and to cling too closely to Andy. She was suffering from HADD, husband attention deficit disorder. The couples therapy for Mom and Dad dealt in part with their own childhood experiences and how the extreme abuse they had endured was being replayed in their new family. It's common knowledge among all clinicians who work in the field that most abusive parents were themselves abused as children. While the improvements at home took a great deal of pressure off Andy,
he remained bored at school. Fortunately, his parents had the option of
trying another public school, one that was somewhat more child-oriented.
As it turned out, his new teacher was a young man.
"Sounds like nothing special to me," the teacher responded. "Just a kid." Andy's "hyperactive" days ended the moment he met his new teacher, a warm, playful man who was willing to provide discipline, when occasionally necessary, in a firm but gentle manner. More relaxed at home and eager to please his new teacher, Andy began to do well in school. Regina: The Daughter Who Had No Problems Andy's younger sister Regina had no school problems, no family problems, and no psychiatric problems. The psychiatrist who diagnosed Andy pointed to Regina as proof that Andy's problem was unique to him and due to his genetic defects and biochemical imbalances. "So you see," he had told Andy's parents, "you're not to blame for his problems. " I met Regina briefly. She was so shy, she couldn't reach out at all, even to our docile rabbit. She was positively terrified of the cockatiel and wouldn't let me open his cage. Her problems were far more debilitating than her brother Andy's. Psychiatry has no diagnoses for children who are too conforming, too inhibited, and just plain too good. Shyness has to reach the proportions of autism or schizophrenia before psychiatry will take notice of it. If the child is a girl, even the most morbid inhibitions may go unnoticed. Hyperactivity: The Invention of a Disease Hyperactivity, as much as any so-called psychiatric disorder, justifies the axiom that "disease is in the eye of the beholder." Teachers typically initiate the process of labeling children as behavior problems, and as Russell Barkley confirms in Hyperactive Children: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment (1981), many teachers believe that a large percentage of their students are aberrant. In one study they labeled 57 percent of the boys and 42 percent of the girls overactive. In another study teachers found that among the boys, 30 percent were overactive, 46 percent disruptive, 49 percent restless, and 43 percent short in attention span. Hyperactivity (HA) is the most frequent justification for drugging children. The difficult-to-control male child is certainly not a new phenomenon, but attempts to give him a medical diagnosis are the product of modern psychology and psychiatry. At first psychiatrists called hyperactivity a brain disease. When no brain disease could be found, they changed it to "minimal brain disease" (MBD). When no minimal brain disease could be found the profession transformed the concept into "minimal brain dysfunction." When no minimal brain dysfunction could be demonstrated, the label became attention deficit disorder. Now it's just assumed to be a real disease, regardless of the failure to prove it so. Biochemical imbalance is the code word, but there's no more evidence for that than there is for actual brain disease. The appalling history of these attempts to blame children for the failings of their parents and schools is described in detail by Peter Schrag and Diane Divosky in the Myth of Hyperactivity (1975) and Gerald Coles in The Learning Mystique (1987). Schrag and Divosky call it "inventing a disease." Even the staid Principles of Neurology (1985), by Raymond Adams and Maurice Victor, finds no significant physical basis to "minimal brain dysfunction." In "The Role of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Learning Disabilities" in the March 1991 Seminars in Neurology, Gerald S. Golden finds no consistent evidence for an underlying physical or chemical cause. In her chapter in Seymour Fisher and Roger Greenberg's The Limits of Biological Treatments for Psychological Distress (1989), Diane McGuinness refers to ADD as "the emperor's new clothes." She observes, "It is currently fashionable to treat approximately one third of all elementary school boys as an abnormal population because they are fidgety, inattentive, and unamenable to adult control." She concludes, however, that "two decades of research have not provided any support for the validity of ADD" or hyperactivity. Neither clinical studies nor psychological testing has been able to identify such a group. The problem, according to McGuinness, is how to get professionals to give up such a vested interest in the use of this powerful label: We have invented a disease, given it medical sanction, and now must disown it. The major question is how we go about destroying the monster we have created. it is not easy to do this and still save face, another reason why physicians and many researchers with years of funding and an academic reputation to protect are reluctant to believe the data. Meanwhile, new labels have been added to describe various learning disorders, such as dyslexia, often supposedly found in association with ADD. Most of the routine problems of growth and development in children are called disorders in the APA's official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. How many children get stuck with one or another label is not known, but it surely runs into the millions. Mental health authorities indicate that many millions of children - remember the 20 percent estimate from NIMH - should be given psychiatric diagnoses. From DSM-III-R, I added up the prevalence rates for the various school-related diagnoses. They totaled up to as much as 57 percent of all girls and 64 percent of all boys. Granted, these totals reflect the top estimate for each disorder, and there also would be some overlap among the diagnoses. On the other hand, the totals do not include the traditional psychiatric diagnoses, such as phobias, depression, and autism. I counted only the new, school-related ones, such as language and reading disorders. The totals are so outlandish that nobody on the DSM-III-R committee probably bothered to add them up. In the 1970s the media, Congress, and the public generated a considerable amount of criticism aimed at the diagnosing and drugging of children; but a review of psychiatric textbooks from the time period discloses that the criticism was either dismissed or ignored. We'll find that up to one million children a year are being drugged with Ritalin alone (chapter 13). Tens of thousands of others are being given minor tranquilizers, neuroleptics, antidepressants, and other psychiatric drugs. And the idea persists that there is evidence of a physical basis for childhood problems. Paul Wender and the Myth of the Child Monster Then a research psychiatrist at NIMH and a professor at Johns Hopkins, Paul Wender set the standard for the radical biological approach to children. He is the coauthor of relevant chapters in recent textbooks. You may recall from chapter 5 that he was also a key investigator in the ludicrous Danish studies that "proved" schizophrenia genetic on the basis of an increased rate of schizophrenia among half brothers and sisters on the father's side. In The Hyperactive Child: A Handbook for Parents (1973), Wender announces that five million children suffer from hyperactivity. Although Wender calls hyperactivity a disease, he admits that "many of the symptoms are present in all children to some degree at some particular time." It's a continuum, and the hyperactive child has an "excessive degree." An excess of what? Energy is the answer. They are "active and restless," they "stood and walked at an early age," and they get into all kinds of trouble because of their energetic inquisitiveness. So begins the disease pattern. In a sequel nearly fifteen years later, The Hyperactive Child, Adolescent, and Adult (1987), Wender inflates his estimate to include up to 10 percent of all children among the diseased. The child labeled ADD and hyperactive is now seen as a miscreant born into a mostly flawless world, which he then goes on to despoil. This is no exaggeration of Wender's view; he compares the child to the awesome giant ape King Kong: As these infants become toddlers, many of them are bundles of energy. The parents frequently report that after an active and restless infancy, the child stood and walked at an early age, and then, like an infant King Kong, burst the bars of his crib and marched forth to destroy the house. He was always on the go, always getting into everything, always touching (and hence, usually by mistake, breaking) every object in sight. When unmatched for a moment he somehow got to the top of the refrigerator and appeared in the middle of the street. In a twinkling, pots and pans were whisked from cupboards, ashtrays knocked off tables. and lamps overturned. (P. 10) Parents who love their children are likely to chortle as they envision them in that description-until they realize that Wender means to drug them. In his earlier work, Wender is very clear about the crux of the problem in dealing with hyperactive youngsters, their failure to comply with requests and prohibitions. The central problem is obedience-but obedience to what? Wender acknowledges that "much of any school experience is boring, tedious, repetitious," and that parents who visit the modern school often wonder how children could pay attention under such regimented conditions. The conflict between the child and the school comes up one more time when Wender declares, "A child who cannot force himself to complete tedious, disagreeable school tasks will have trouble in mastering reading, spelling, and arithmetic" (p. 37). Apparently these observations on the oppressiveness of the schools were too much of an embarrassment to his biopsychiatric ideology. They are edited out of the later edition. Wender also observes that many of these children do fine outside of school, so that medication does not have to be prescribed for "weekends, holidays, and vacations." Wender recognizes that the families of these children are often very disturbed, but he doesn't see this as causing the child's problem. Instead, "family disturbances are often the result and not the cause of the child's problem." In Wender's world, the people with the power and authority - the parents and the schools - are the victims, while the children, who have neither power nor authority, are the perpetrators. Contemporary psychiatric literature has turned psychosocial wisdom and knowledge on its head, and increasingly the child is blamed for problems in the family, schools, and society. Wender is a strong advocate of drugs, but he admits that children never like the medication." After drug treatment, the children "generally become calmer and less active, develop a longer span of attention, become less stubborn, and are easier to manage." In his 1987 book he advocates medication for most ADD and hyperactive children. While Wender is a radical biopsychiatrist, he is a leader in the field of ADD and hyperactivity, and even moderates follow the same basic themes. Reviews by Gerald Coles in The Learning Mystique (1987) and Diane McGuinness in Fisher and Greenberg's The Limits of Biological Treatments for Psychological Distress (1989) show that research does not confirm the existence of an ADD syndrome. For example, in the October 1984 Exceptional Children, Lisa Fleisher and her colleagues find that the ADD syndrome lacks supportive evidence and should be clinically discarded. In the February 1985 issue of the same journal, S. Jay Samuels and Nancy Miller find no differences in attention span between normal children and those with school problems. They do find that all children focus their attention better in small classes with more teacher involvement. Common sense suggests that some children have more difficulty focusing their attention in school than do others. The natural exuberance and imagination of many children make them "drift off" while sitting in a classroom. I've talked to highly successful professional adults who confess to daydreaming the moment they sit down in their kids' elementary school classrooms on parents' night. For other children drifting off can be a sign of post-traumatic stress disorder due to neglect, beatings, or sexual abuse. Other kids are under too much stress at home to focus their attention properly. Or they come from economically and socially impoverished homes where there's little help in learning how to focus their attention. Daniel Hallahan and his team report in the April 1978 Journal of Learning Disabilities that these children lack a sense of "locus of control." They don't believe in their own ability to control their environment, so they don't pay attention to it. To these children, "Positive and negative events happen because of luck, fate, involvement of other persons, or as 'just one of those things.' " This has been designated "learned helplessness" by other researchers. In my The Psychology of Freedom it is called psychological helplessness and the failure to be self-determining. It's a psychosocial problem. The vast majority of children who get labeled ADD or hyperactive are boys. Russell Barkley cites estimates as high as nine boys for every one girl but favors the ratio of six to one. The reasons for the disproportionate number of boys are not difficult to ascertain. Boys are brought up to express more of their activity, aggressiveness, independence, and defiance; they therefore run into more conflict with harried, inadequate, or absentee parents and with boring, understaffed schools. Boys learn their aggressiveness from their male peers, from school sports, from the TV and movies-from everywhere in the culture. Conversely, girls are carefully taught to be more submissive, to pay more attention to the requirements of other people, and to keep themselves under good control. In school this translates into "paying attention." As Andy's story dramatized, so-called hyperactive children are often at war with the world while their fathers sit on the sidelines. In addition to love, they need attention, a firm hand, and a stimulating environment. These normal needs can be read between the lines of the diagnostic descriptions in the DSM-III-R: "Signs of the disorder may be minimal or absent when the person is receiving frequent reinforcement or very strict control, or in a novel setting or a one-to-one situation (e.g., being examined in a clinician's office, or interacting with a video game)." Notice that these children are so hungry for attention that their symptoms sometimes do not show up when being examined one-to-one in the clinician's office! Attention deficit disorder reflects our own unwillingness to give enough attention to our children. On the other hand, children like Andy's sister Regina are crippled precisely because they can so regularly conform to the demands of school. In children, as in adults, there is no evidence that any of the common psychological or psychiatric disorders have a genetic or biological component. The typical school-related diagnoses - attention deficit disorder and learning disorder, as well as so-called hyperactivity, depression, autism, and schizophrenia - tend to cover up the abuse, neglect, miscommunication, and family conflict that drive children into despair and failure. Psychiatric labeling inflicts additional humiliation and injury on already damaged children. It can rob them of all self-esteem, shatter their identity among their peers, and relegate them to inferior status in the eyes of parents and teachers. Often the stigma remains for a lifetime. David Simmonds points out that children cannot resist the labeling process, and he suggests, "A child's rights may indeed include the right not to be a scapegoat. . . . Psychiatric labels have not proved to be assets to individuals in their future endeavors." In the subtitle to his essay, Simmonds poignantly captures the child's plight: "Daddy, why do I have to be the crazy one?" While diagnosing and labeling is injurious, most children can be helped relatively easily by interventions aimed not at the child but at the family and the school. Even some severely disturbed autistic children can be helped toward an improved life with caring educational interventions, especially when they involve the parents and help them to relate better to their children. Adults, not children, have the power, and therefore they have both the responsibility and the satisfaction of improving the lives of the children in their care. Because children are so in need of love, discipline, and guidance from adults, the parents of unhappy, frustrated, and even despairing children can almost always be sure of helping their children improve the quality of their lives. If the adults who plan and run our schools also were willing and able to do their part, many other so-called childhood disorders would never surface. Those that remained would be largely due to broader societal factors, such as poverty, male supremacy, and racism, as well as parents who for one reason or another cannot learn to adequately raise their children. Clearly, however, the efforts of individual adults will not always suffice. The single working parent can do his or her best, but society also needs to do something to relieve the parent's plight. Similarly, overburdened principals and teachers need the support of educational reform. Too often it seems easier to diagnose and blame the children, and too often the mental health professions encourage that seemingly easier solution. And as harmful as psychiatric labeling is for children, it frequently is but the first involuntary step along a still more disastrous path. We turn now to the wholesale drugging and escalating incarceration of children. Suggested Reading List - Ritalin, ADD, ADHD, Learning Disorders, Alternative Solutions Order Toxic Psychiatry by Peter Breggin. M.D. Back to Main Ritalin/ADHD Page Back to Main SNTP Page Don't drug a child and . . . Say NO To Psychiatry!
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
