Psychoanalyzing Children

As most parents are fully aware, most children are not blessed with placid temperaments. They are notoriously prone to questioning authority, and to protesting "you're not the boss of me!" They are adept at infuriating their parents - at every age, from infant to adolescence and quite beyond. They can be adamantly single-minded when representing something they wish to do or to acquire, and won't be talked down.

Their attention spans can be irritatingly short, and they manage to 'forget' what they have no intention of remembering.

They can, in short drive even the most patient of parents to distraction. Not all the time, obviously, but, it seems most of the time. Their 'acting out' and temper tantrums can seem puzzlingly inappropriate, reacting in an unforeseen manner to something that seems, to a parent's mind, of slight dimensions.

These little, and growing human individuals can be angelic at one moment (famously, asleep) and raging dynamos the next.

But they are not, definitely not, on the lunatic fringe of normal. Behaviour that perplexes parents in their children is very normal. Human beings reach toward individuality and independence, even as, at the same time, they are gregarious in nature and imitative by design, and seek comfort in being with others; not quite so independent.

But they are most certainly dependent on the sane deliberations of their parents.

Guidance and values handed down from parents to children through a well functioning (this is, of course, relatively speaking) family situation forms the basic character of the child. Underlying, or rather overlaid is the public, social child whose antics may sometimes almost convince a parent of switched hospital bassinets.

Despite which, parents should be aware of a kind of health-professional-pharmaceutical-production conspiracy.

Yes, there are children whose behaviour transcends the norm, and they may indeed require professional assistance, and even prescribed mind-altering chemicals to help cope. (Help the parents cope, more likely) No one said it was easy, parenting. That aside, the psychiatric profession has been busy, very busy, creating additional business opportunities for themselves. In lock-step with the pharmaceutical industry.

Formulating new guidelines for recognition of amazing new mental disorders that no one, ever before, dreamed of. Current-day children are incredibly prone to a wide array of mental dysfunction; we know that because the psychiatric profession tells us so.

They're doing this through a universally sinister plot whose guidelines for mental-dysfunction recognition are neatly laid out in their most recent draft of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Thank heavens, the entire profession isn't involved and there are some notable, honourable professionals who question the very professional morality of labelling children's behaviours as mentally aberrant. Temper tantrums?

"It's a healthy expression of frustration. It's a very serious move to contemplate that as a bona fide mental illness, which is what they're very seriously proposing." (Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness.)

And Dr. Allen Frances, professor emeritus at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina worries about children being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder. Leading potentially to over-diagnosis. And labelling ordinary children with extraordinary behaviours as 'ill', effectively excusing their inexcusable lack of self-discipline; a learning process in normative socialization.

"Whenever you create a new category that has a boundary with normality, you're definitely going to have a high prevalence", says Dr. Frances, and presumably he should know, having chaired a task force that created the current edition of the psychiatrists' bible known as the DSM-IV.

Bipolar disorder diagnoses increased hugely after the definition was broadened, to include irritability. Irritability. Really.

In Canada, prescriptions for powerful anti-psychotics for children and teenagers has doubled in recent years, with close to 1.7-million prescriptions for "atypical"; newer anti-psychotics filled for people under the age of 20. These are drugs prescribed for symptoms like "aggression", "low frustration tolerance", and mood and anxiety disorders.

Let's face it, raising kids is tough. But do we really need to drug them to ensure compliance? Children do eventually mature. They become adults. What kind of adults ensue from diagnoses compelled by parents seeking help in raising their unruly children that proclaim them to be mentally unfit?

The prescription should be patience; it usually works.