REMEMBER THE ancient ways of childhood before the Age of Psychology? It brings tears to the eyes. Think of all the children who were unmedicated. Contemplate the little ones who didn’t go to therapists or who had only names, not diagnostic labels.

Erik Kolbell, a psychotherapist writing in the New York Times, states that children suffered cruelly before there were professionals like him:

Most children exercise very little power over the decisions that affect their lives. They don’t decide who their parents are, where their family will live, where they will attend school, when they will reach puberty, who will or will not befriend them. They have limited control over their athletic skills, their looks, their wit, or whether, in the great Serengeti that is their schoolyard, they will be predator or prey. They are as much the subject of their story as its author.

At toxic moments, the insights to be gained from a professional who takes this stuff seriously (and in some instances the medications that can bring calm to chaos) are eminently useful to the child who is looking for a narrow path through some very difficult years.

Why is it that psychologists are allowed to openly hawk their wares under the guise of neutrality? Would a candy bar salesman be permitted space in the Times to argue that children are better off since Snickers were invented? No, of course not. A psychotherapist is more priest than salesman in the eyes of a therapeutic culture. The idea that he is self-interested violates the sacred trust between patient and healer, buyer and hawker of shoddy goods.

Rita writes:

Agreed, considering he gets this ad space for free. I guess that’s why newspaper readership is so low. Even a fool grows weary of being “pitched” all the time.

Karen I. writes:

Erik Kolbell makes reference to what he calls the “toxic moments” in a child’s life where therapy and even drugs can help. Unfortunately, many of the toxic moments he talks about, such as a child being unable to control many things also applies to adult life. Adults cannot help it if they get sick, experience a tragedy, and so on. It seems to me Kolbell does not have much faith in the resiliency of children and their ability to learn to cope with the realities of life. Instead, he seeks to shelter them by providing therapy for disappointments and drugs for character traits. How do the children then learn to function as adults? 

As for applying labels to children, as a parent who had this happen with a very small child who was late talking, I can tell you what happens. It becomes a mess. Parents see a problem in their child, so they seek the advice of experts, who often have differing opinions on what the child should be labeled, but who always agree some label is needed. After hearing conflicting views from the experts, parents may balk at applying any label. They are told it is necessary for the sake of insurance if they wish to obtain services to help the child overcome their problem. Parents become resigned to having a label on the child and start to learn about what the label means. After awhile, they start to see the child through the lens of the label. Everything the child does that even remotely fits the label is seen as confirmation that the label is correct. The label begins to interfere with normal parent – child interaction as the parent assumes he or she already knows all there is to know about the child – after all, the label comes with a complete description. Experts in whatever the label is (autism is a big one these days) are seen as the authority when it comes to the child as the parent is pushed aside in the name of treatment. Treatment is expensive and exhausting, disrupting normal family life as “interventions” ( which vary depending on the label) take the place of normal family interactions. Soon, the entire family and often the extended family becomes dysfunctional as it begins to revolve around the label, it’s possible causes, it’s interventions, it’s symptoms and so on. This then makes the family unit a whole new problem for the experts to treat as everyone in it from parents to siblings are seen as codependent or worse. Thank God my child’s label is not considered accurate by the so-called experts anymore, but my heart breaks for all of the other families who find themselves in the middle of the nightmare so often created by the well-meaning “professionals.”

Mabel LeBeau writes:

The psychotherapy profession offers a valuable service to Americans, in rather more socially acceptable niche where none existed before.

If one only looks at the widespread matter of dysfunctionality in families through available treatment modalities, one might consider popular alternatives for family issues available in the 1940’s and 50’s. (Within families, for that is where most ‘problems’ centered and still do exist as the cultural unit for upbringing in our society, the ‘black sheep’ was often singled out as the central focus of all problems; a single member of the family, or a single entity described as ‘the incorrigibles’, ‘the brats–to be seen and not heard’, the ‘melancholic mother’, or the ‘absent father’, or some specific element in families that messed it up for everyone in the household.)

By the 1950’s individual treatments had devolved from deaths at the pillories, hangings (as witches), or convalescence from bloodletting and other incapacitating treatments which afforded ‘society’ relief from the antics of those problem individuals at the very least ‘putting the problems out of sight and out of mind’ to much more ‘humane’ electroconvulsive shock, coldwater baths, lockdown restraint admissions to often overcrowded, understaffed insane asylums, brainscrambling lobotomies, induction of crowd-control drug addictions to therapeutic dependence on drugs providing pain-free daily existence.

As a health care professional, just reviewing the article as linked in the post, it seems the interviewed psychotherapist provides a little tongue-in-cheek comparison from his childhood to what is available today, but fails to point out that for many, resolution of issues may most beneficially be treated with a combination of effective cognitive behavioral therapy and judicious use of prescribed medications. I have found that articles printed in specific online editions of well-respected journals and newspapers such as Time, and Wall Street Journal tend to publish less well-documented articles by authors without adequate references.

Laura writes:

The Times author was not referring to the type of serious brain disorders or psychic conditions that may have landed someone in an insane asylum in the past. He was describing problems that are common.

The medicalizing of child development has undermined parental confidence and authority and damaged the lives of many children, labeling them sick when they have normal childhood problems. There are many decent and intelligent people in the profession. At their best, they offer compassion in a society that is cold and alienating, help identify the minority who face serious organic disorders and teach parents a little something about the children who mystify them. But all too often, they provide phony diagnoses and phony cures. They present a veneer of scientific respectability when there is no proof for many of the diagnoses they make.  And, none of the medications prescribed for children are ever clinically tested on children. It is pure guess work as to their long-term effects.

The psychology profession is an enemy of the family. It actively wages war against warmth, intimacy and love.

Mabel writes:

I tend to disagree with the unstated underlying contention that psyhotherapists promote ‘medicalizing’ children which in turn undermines parent confidence in nurturing and properly caring for their child during early developmental stages in life.

Furthermore, I firmly and categorically disagree that the psychology profession is the enemy of the family. The majority of childhood disorders necessarily are based on adults observing children, not the child providing the skilled professional with an objective self-analysis, or insightful response to questions. A psychiatric assessment for ADHD might be based on the maximum of a two-hour observation period. Pediatricians base the majority of their diagnosis on what parents tell them, and often it’s a third-person account of a childhood educator describing the hallmark signs of inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity as a little boy’s slowness to follow direction, inability to get along with others, fidgeting, etc. other undesirable effects on maintaing classroom order.

It is my opinion, short of a sense of wariness in seeming to blame successes and failures in childhood development on the parents themselves, the major problem is a lack of parenting flexibility in our society, in conjunction with unrealistic expectations.

Regardless of whether the issue of more than 4 million diagnoses of ADHD at present compared with 2.5 million in the 1970’s, has to do with widespread and inappropriately presented coverage in the public media e.g. Women’s Daily, Ladies Home Journal, etc., increased ease in ability for pediatricians to diagnose the disorder, looser criteria for diagnosis (and thus use of drugs indicated for ADHD treatment by the FDA and necessarily have undergone rigorous drug testing and research at the very least to prove use of the drug is better compared to placebo), increased incidence of children who do not have ADHD (and are inappropriately diagnosed and treated), or even if ADHD is increasing (due to other factors such as lack of physical exercise, exposure to incandescent light bulbs vs. sunlight, etc.); the ‘medicalizing’ of children has more to do with our ‘pop a pill’ society than availability of cognitive behavior therapy and family counseling which is often the mainstay of the psychotherapists’ armementarian.

In our society, the family unit is responsible for care and providing opportunity for child development. Pediatricians, psychologists, and psychotherapists do not seek out children in need of care, rather it is the parents and early childhood educators that identify behaviors in children they are ill-equipped to handle. Then, the parents seek out the prescriptive solutions which only those with authority to write prescriptions can provide.

Again, I am not a philosopher adept in conceptualizing scenarios outside my area of expertise nor beyond what I’ve seen, observed, and experienced. One incident brought more clearly to mind what the effect of administering heavy-duty drugs to children when 4 year old Rebecca Riley staggered and collapsed in death after her mother continued administering accelerated doses of a drug which modulates output of the sympathetic nervous system. Admittedly, illness feigned as Munchausen syndrome by proxy is uncommon, and parental abuse of a childs’ prescribed stimulants is more common undesired effect of inappropriate prescribing drug treatment for ADHD, the issue of Rebecca’s death points out poignantly, that in the end the medicalizing of children is ultimately done on the parent’s watch.

My contention is that the sorts of diagnoses requiring treatments with the drugs currently available are based on the same types of issues that have been around a long time, often undiagnosed, or treated with unsubstantiated therapies. It is my opinion that previously available therapeutic modalities such as were available in the early part of the 20th century were designed to stigmatize and compartmentalize those with the disorder to immobilize, and take them out of the mainstream of society. As a consequence, many people are unaware of the depth of moral depravity of our society in the care and treatment of children since the founding of our country.

Again, my disclaimer, most of this contention is my own opinion based on what I have seen behind the prescription counter at your local Wal-mart. I am not a teacher, nor a philosopher. Rather, I decry parents that do not support the fundamental goodness of their children in this world abdicating responsibility for obtaining necessary tools to others in society.

Laura writes:

You are right that no one is forcing parents into therapists’ offices or forcing adults to administer drugs to their children, although in some cases it comes very close to that when schools threaten parents if they do not medicate their children. And, I agree with your statement that the main problem is a crisis in parental “flexibility” and expectations. But I think this crisis has been advanced by an army of psychologists. It is unfair to blame only these psychology professionals when the real evil is a therapeutic worldview that reduces human beings to conditions, disorders, diseases and syndromes and that emphatically denies the existence of true evil and higher good.

I don’t deny that this worldview has some agreeable results. It would not have gained a hold over our lives if it did not. People who were once ostracized and shamed are accepted. They are victims of their psychological conditions, rather than bad or immoral or weird. It is a relief to be able to say of someone whose behavior is strange and mystifying that he has Bipolar Disorder or Asperger’s Syndrome or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. These labels help us navigate the confusing variation among individuals, the bewildering array of personalities and oddities, and they absolve us of making judgments. In an age of moral relativism, judgments are frightening; diagnoses are not. In some cases, these labels do prevent people from unfairly shaming those who are odd or different. In some, there are identifiable organic medical conditions, but these cases are very few compared to the vast numbers who are being treated.

A parent who knows little about children, perhaps having become a parent relatively late after years with little or no contact with children, often finds relief in a psychological diagnosis. This provides confirmation that they are encountering serious difficulties in a child. They may find a sense of a community among parents who are experiencing the same problems, and in a cold and alienating world, any community is welcome.

You mention cognitive behavior therapy and family counseling as sources of sensible advice and help for parents.  The vast majority of therapists heavily rely on the current diagnoses listed in the DSM and many of these conditions are quackery. Yes, the symptoms are all there and these behaviors are real, but the actual sicknesses diagnosed are often not organic disorders and do not meet the classic definition of sicknesses at all.

Treating a sickness is very different from treating a character deformity, personal weakness or sin. When a family is experiencing a crisis, it is impossible and wrong to separate their problems from matters of higher meaning and issues of good and evil. A psychological problem is always a spiritual and moral problem too. Always.

Hannon writes:

I agree with Laura’s sentiments in the original entry regarding clinical psychology and psychiatry. While there can be no doubt these professionals provide an important benefit to some children (and adults) that significantly improves quality of life, I see this class of workers as primarily another insulating layer in the managerial state. This state cannot function except as a collusion between private and public administration, a seductive blend of soft coercion and historic momentum. Its power is far in excess of any demonstrated benefit. After a while it just seems to be the way things are, which illusion is the present foundation of liberal progress.

Intuitively something tells me these soul-sniping venues are quite fragile by their very nature. They win us over in moments of weakness, not strength. Our more traditional ways of coping with troublesome children have been cast away with scarcely any resistance because we have not stopped to think things through– not because the arguments from psychology are so compelling. Additional proof of this is in the staggering effort with which pharmaceutical companies have launched thousands of new drugs, made billions of dollars and even have the nerve to advertise on TV drugs we cannot obtain without “mentioning it to our doctor”, all in the most languid, dreamy and downright bizarre presentations. I think we can wake up one day and say “this is largely superfluous and even destructive. We need to stop supporting it.”

Maybe our vulnerability coincides with plain old tiredness from the vagaries of hectic modern life. How can parents even function working two or more jobs between them and raising one or more children, let alone enjoy life, without DRUGS? How rapidly we passed the stage of initial stigmatization for using mood enhancing pills from our doctors!

One could go on, but I find it intriguing that the drugs prescribed to school children seem to always be for the diagnosed maladies of weaker, more sensitive types, while violent and thuggish but otherwise “normal” students manage to avoid drug therapy. They cannot be removed from the classroom in most cases so they remain and bring down the spirit and performance of everyone, including the teachers. They are not clinically “disordered” but they are a menace that does far more damage than the quiet loners who seem to always inspire fear in everyone.

Laura writes:

Actually, many of the thugs or dangerous types are receiving medication too. For instance, Eric Harris, the more infamous of the two shooters at Columbine, was taking psychiatric medication and had received therapy as well. (I am not suggesting his violence was caused by this treatment.)

Lydia Sherman writes:

Do you see what they are doing? These same experts would claim a right to easy divorce, for example, or self-expression or self-fulfillment as a parent. Yet, they fail to recognze the trauma it creates for children. These are things that could be changed or controlled by the adult. Instead, these people attack the normal unchangeables, such as not being able to choose who your parents are, who your siblings are, what they look like, or what happens in normal life. It’s an attack on the family as the social unit for children. 

The psychologists look at children as “prey” in society and fail to see that they become prey in the artificial system of the public school. It is not the family system that harms them, it is the society outside the home. Home was created for their own development and protection. The narrow path through difficult years should be the home.

Laura writes:

The psychology industry has aided and abetted divorce and family breakdown. How many therapists actually tell a client that divorce and adultery are categorically wrong? Let’s be sensible here. Why would anyone disapprove of the actions of someone who is paying for their services and for absolution? It’s comparable to the old plenary indulgences in which people paid priests to be absolved of their sins. It’s true in the traditional psychoanalytic relationship, the therapist was secure enough because of the length of the treatment and the committment involved to say disagreeable things. But that model no longer prevails and psychoanalysis still ultimately absolved the client of moral responsibility for his actions. Today therapy is often short term and the relationship is relatively superficial. So any serious disapproval from the therapist is even more unlikely.

Van Wijk writes:

Here’s a hilarious spoof story from The Onion that I’ve always enjoyed, entitled “Ritalin Cures Next Picasso.”

Rita writes:

While I too lament the former treatments for insanity in “overcrowded, understaffed insane asylums” with “brainscrambling lobotomies” etc., there’s no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Some persons with serious mental disabilities do need to be segregated from society for their own sake and for the sake of others. Obviously, we will want to treat these patients humanely. This is only a small segment of our society though. As Laura alluded to, most of the rest of us have moral roads we can take that would solve or alleviate most of our problems and those of our children. This blogs covers many of these solutions. But hey, popping a pill is so much easier than changing!

Karen I. writes:

If a family or individual feels they need outside help, they might be better off turning to trusted religious advisors or at least counselors with a strong religious background. Our local Catholic Family Services tells clients up front that they are not in the business of encouraging people to get divorced. 

I also think that kids have many of the same problems children have always had, but where adults did not give some things a second thought in the past, they now medicalize it. Late talking children are an example. Many older women told me they used to just say “he’ll talk when he is ready”. Now, it is seen as a sign of many problems, especially autism. There is a huge push to screen all children for the autism symptoms as young as 18 months old. At that age, it is impossible to tell if the child is late talking or truly autistic, but if symptoms of autism are found (late talking is a big one), the child will likely be considered “on the spectrum”. Another popular diagnosis for boys that parents may hear their child has when they are late talking is something called “sensory integration disorder”. It is a made-up disorder based on unproven theories put forth by occupational therapists, who also happen to be the same people that treat the “disorder” at a high cost. Some parents have lost their homes to pay occupational and speech therapy costs as it is often not covered by insurance. Parents who read about it will find they cannot win. A child may be diagnosed with it if they like rough play, or avoid rough play, or if they like very hot baths or very cold baths. This sort of thing is just an example of many traits that are considered symptoms of the disorder. It is a label parents should do everything in their power to avoid having applied to their child. I am sure you will get others who say that is not true if you publish this, but it is absolutely true, because parents should not be eager to label their children as having unproven “disorders”. Those labels go on files in things like school transcripts and can follow someone for life, limiting opportunities for everything from medical insurance to employment in fields like police work or the military, which are the very sort of things late talking boys especially could excel at.

Please follow and like us: