Of course, even in the absence of a viable definition, diagnoses have increased 40 fold just in the time period from 1994 to 2002. But don't worry, they'll hand out hardcore prescription pills like candy based on stringent criteria like:
The Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation provides a 65-item online test with questions like, is your child "very intuitive and/or very creative"? Is he "intolerant of delays"? According to the survey, these characteristics could suggest bipolar disorder. (Or it could be "temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria," yet another label that might soon be added to the list, suggesting a sort of bipolar lite.)The "experts" weigh in and, shockingly, blame those nefarious insurance companies and the lack of access to mental health professionals (seriously!):
And yet the mental health system is so fragmented, variable in quality, and frankly unfair to those without money that "there are virtually no guidelines, no gatekeepers—other than the insurance companies, who essentially create protocols for care according to what they will pay for."So the experts think we need more involvement from strangers telling us how to raise our children. And all of them encourage increased psychiatric help despite the numbers of bipolar cases increasing so rapidly. None of them even consider that perhaps the kids need less impersonal dissection, not more. But we can't expect anything else from the scientific establishment, so tainted by PC and leftism that the public should view their findings incredulously.
Insurers stepped in as gatekeepers because access to psychiatrists had to be limited. Why? For every 11,000 American children—of whom at least 1,000 to 2,000develop a mental health disorder—we have only a single pediatric psychiatrist. There simply aren't enough doctors around to provide the key treatment for explosive behavior: face-to-face time for cognitive and behavioral therapy.
In reality, there's a collusive effort amongst helicopter parents, complicit doctors, insurance companies, educational romantics, anti-male culture, acritical culture, single mothers and emasculated fathers. I'll very briefly touch on each of these in bullet form:
Single Mothers and Emasculated Fathers: Children, especially boys, simply do not listen to maternal parental figures. With the increasing rate of single motherhood and the cultural undermining of father figures through feminism and pop culture that frames them as ignorant dolts, children simply have no one to put them in their place.
Anti-male/boy culture: Many cases of ADD and ADHD are simply rambunctious boys. In the early years of these diseases, only kids with actual problems were targeted; now, any slightly hyper boy gets deemed a headcase.
Acritical culture: "Anything goes" culture of liberalism discourages parents from dictating behavior and delineating boundaries. So if your 5 year-old son wants to dress up as the Little Mermaid, better let him.
Helicopter parents and Educational Romantics: Suburban mothers, in the era of the "Genuis in Us All", can't accept mediocrity in their children. Thus, they react histrionically to their child experiencing any mild delay or illustrating average proclivities. They naively believe that expert involvement will cure their children of these concocted maladies. So they seek advice from doctors willing to prescribe anything in order to dampen the mother's excitement and pocket some money from big pharma.
And the War on Childhood continues...
22 comments:
Given that I know a bipolar person well, the promiscuous tossing of the term around strikes me as ignorant of basic facts of mental illness.
I'm not a mental health professional but here is a simple litmus test for bipolarity: does the person exhibit behavior that appears disconnected from reality, and say/do things that appear nonsensical and random to others? does his behavior come in 'onsets' or 'episodes,' sometimes with blackouts, and is otherwise normal outside of those timeframes?
If yes, chances are there is a real mental illness invovled.
I knew the standards for diagnosis were pretty low, but "very intuitive and/or very creative?" C'mon.
My guess is there has been some real increase of actual problematic behavior by children in the last few decades. But I would wager that (a) it isn't as large as the numbers suggest and (b) it's due less to a lack of psychological counseling and more to a lack of paternal presence, either literally in the case of blacks (i.e. dad's in prison) or figuratively in the case of SWPL whites (i.e. dad's a p*ssy).
I'd keep in mind that psychologists and psychiatrists (and drug companies) probably see a large potential market in diagnosing/drugging/"treating"(with multiple office visits) children.
They want on the taxpayer-funded-gravy train in other words.
If you ever have to go to a chiropractor for a vertabrae that has slid a little off center, and need it popped back into place, they will usually attempt to find out how many office visits per year your insurance will pay for, and then claim you will need that many office visits to "fix" you. They can generally put you back into "place" in a few weeks (8-10 visits), but will gladly let you come back 30 or 40 times if your insurance will pay for it.
What psyche doctors would like with a government-mandated-health bill is little different. Its employment for them, and money for the drug companies (and pharmacies). 3 groups of people get paid when you go on a FDA-approved-by-prescription-only medication, and they want their money. Its bogus of course.
We shouldn't have very many people with mental problems at this stage in history. Your genes didn't evolve to make you dysfunctional.
I work, as a nurse, in a psychiatric ward. Bipolar Disorder is a real problem and can affect children too but diagnosis is not easy.
To do a proper diagnosis require time, sometimes months or years. What you have before is simply a diagnosis fitting what amount to a still photo, where what you really need is the full movie.
The brain of the child is maturing, so often the problem will fix itself, giving the right setting (family, school, etc.). But often these settings are pathogenic. Even real pathological cases behave better and have a better outcome if the family AND the school are healthy places where live and develop.
The publishing industry, spurred on by the talk show culture in which we live, is largely responsible for this kind of labeling frenzy.
Write a book (rigorous research/scholarship not necessary); publisher sees parents/educators, liberal culture at large willing to buy into anything that relieves parents/child of failure to succeed in school, in social situations; writer pushes idea that one's child is suffering from a medical condition on Oprah, Dr. Phil, Today Show, etc./ advocacy groups spring up and demand special services from schools/more appearances on the talk show circuit/ politicians are lobbied and begin introducing bills........
Just reporting in from SWPL Capital of the World, Berkeley, CA.
I have a 2 year old, and so spend a great deal of time with other parents of small children. It could be that I have managed to assemble a grossly atypical group of parents, but this is what I see. Sample size - about 30 families.
--no single moms (or dads)
--only one set of same-gender parents
--about 5 families are the schedule tons of activites/helicopter parenting types
--about 20 families subscribe to 'free range kids' or Waldorf-style parenting
--average is considered perfectly acceptable, although people are of course pleased if their child seems above average in some way. In general, I'd say all pay attention to keeping an eye on their kids to see that they are developing more-or-less 'on schedule', but none are obsessed about it.
--of the 3 children that seem to have delays in one area or another (mine is one), none of the parents are hysterical or overinvolved.
--about 1/2 are aware of the memes of feminization of men, the anti-boy culture, and so on.
--all but 2 families are otherwise 100% SWPL, super-liberal.
--About half are families where the mother is home full time with the kids, and the father works to earn all the money.
--none seem to have the Munchausen-by-proxy desire to get their kids labeled with some BS disorder & get on the medication train.
--In about 20 of the households, the mother is actually the primary disciplinarian. Almost all of the kids are well-behaved, at a level that's appropriate for their age.
The stuff you are concerned about is real, and a real problem. I'm not sure how much you can extrapolate form my small, maybe unrepresentative sample. Also, only 2 of the kids that are part of my sample are older than 4. But I wanted to put it out there.
I don't think mothers being disciplinarians is part of the problem. For instance, my great-grandmother had 9 children, and 7 of them were boys. Considering my great-grandfather worked 10 and 12 hour shifts at a syrup plant every day except Sunday, she was the primary disciplinarian. All of my great uncles turned out fine, with 4 of them becoming engineers despite their poor "Appalachia" background. Are you seriously telling me that women aren't capable of disciplining one or two male children when most of our ancestors were disciplining 4 or 5 at the least? And I'm sure they didn't tolerate hyperactivity either.
The problem is more cultural than anything. We have just spoiled all of our children to death by drilling this pervading mantra into their head "It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks!"....
I'm not sure how much you can extrapolate form my small, maybe unrepresentative sample.
OT, but here's my two cents: public liberals are private conservatives more often than not, with the resources to insulate themselves from the consequences of liberal policies.
"So the experts think we need more involvement from strangers telling us how to raise our children."
You've missed the point. The article argues that face time with a trained doctor could REPLACE a prescription for anti-psychotic medication. Unless you think meeting with a psychiatrist once a week is more invasive than the daily ingestion of powerful mood-altering drugs, then the author is arguing for LESS involvement from strangers, not more.
However, insurance companies prefer you to just get a prescription, because it's cheaper. So the MORE invasive procedure gets prescribed.
gee, I think I HAD bipolar disorder.
luckily, in the countryside I didn't get any therapy and thus am now healed. hehehe
I've suffered from bipolar disorder / manic depression for a long time. I don't know what causes it, but it's definitely real, and none of your causes were applicable to me. Maybe for some though, who knows.
Lack of wars is also a problem. In prior generations you could always count on wars killing off a large percentage of the low-functioning males in society, since they got shipped off to the front lines as cannon fodder.
One,
I'm sure you have seen this by now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/education/09gap.html?src=me&ref=general
Apparently the new explanation is "deficient early childhood parenting".
"none of your causes were applicable to me. Maybe for some though, who knows."
That's probably because it is in large part genetic. Many doctors will swear against it. I've personally known two families, one with brothers both having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and another with 6 cases in two generations among 10 individuals representing those generations(and 3 suicides among them).
"You've missed the point."
As is usual, it is you who has missed the point. 40x as many kids in 2002 didn't need a personal psychiatrist or pills as needed it in 1994. The whole phenomena is bullshit.
As someone who has been well acquainted with real bipolar teens and adults, as well as a someone who works somewhat closely with an abundance of children (and in fact someone whose entire family has worked either in medicine or education almost exclusively for a few generations now), the idea that there is an abundance of mentally ill children is abject garbage.
Because your kid doesn't listen to his teachers, and prefers to doodle in the margins rather than study isn't a pathological behavior and it wasn't treated as one until very recently. A case of 'boys will be boys' is now a case of bipolar. No.
This sh't is why my boys aren't in school. They are smart, rambunctious, creative and aggressive. And the one old enough to take the tests scores at the very top of standardized tests, all without the stupid professionals teaching him. I will be damned if some idiot conformity enthusiast is going to bully me into drugging my boys till they act like girls.
Nowadays if a boy won't sit still like a girl, they tell you something is wrong with him.
When my grandpa was in school, anyone who had a boy that sat still like a girl knew there was something wrong with him.
We live in an age so depraved that people find normal behavior shocking.
Racial differences are due to culture.
But boys acting like boys is due to mental illness.
How weak minded does one have to be to believe this stuff?
"Nowadays if a boy won't sit still like a girl, they tell you something is wrong with him.
When my grandpa was in school, anyone who had a boy that sat still like a girl knew there was something wrong with him."
I'm pretty sure that in school 50 years ago all children were expected to respect authority, which included not being unnecessarily rambunctious during classtime. Considering my dad has plenty of stories about getting smacked on the hand with a ruler in 1960s' Catholic school, your allegations about the supposed acceptance of unruly behavior are false.
Interesting that we have a war on drugs to protect children from the horrors of pharmaceuticals, while at the same time promoting a war for drugs by medicating students. The hypocrisy is not lost on many young people who do not opt into the system.
What's wrong with the adults in this country?
"I'm pretty sure that in school 50 years ago all children were expected to respect authority, which included not being unnecessarily rambunctious during classtime. Considering my dad has plenty of stories about getting smacked on the hand with a ruler in 1960s' Catholic school, your allegations about the supposed acceptance of unruly behavior are false."
I never said it was accepted. I said they thought it was normal. As in normal boys have to be beat in order to get them to sit still. No one thought smacking a kid was abuse. It was normal to smack them to get them to behave. They sure didn't think the kids were mentally ill. They didn't take them to the doctor to drug them. They just whipped them into shape.
Anonymous, or one of them, has a strikingly different perspective than I.
I sat still like a boy while all the other male children acted like animals. I was the one who was accused of being abnormal.
I doubt it has settled down much since I was a kid.
"I sat still like a boy while all the other male children acted like animals. I was the one who was accused of being abnormal."
Yeah, and I was a girl who got into fights.
Neither makes a kid mentally ill. It is just part of being young. The shy kids grow out of being so shy and the rough kids learn self control etc. Medication for normal variation is downright creepy. FWIW the book, The Difficult Child pretty much makes the point that even kids at the tails of the distribution are still normal. The author points out that it isn't just 80%-90% of kids that are normal, it is more like 99.9% that are normal even though a significant minority are damned annoying.
The problem is that teachers (and parents) can not touch the kids, so for many the easiest way to cope with difficulties is to drug them. This was not possible before the drugs existed, but after it is.
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