Kids Will Be Kids

Parents may claim they suspected as much all along.  Facing the impossibility of dealing with the disordered moods of their teen-age sons and daughters, never quite knowing when something will set them off.  Dealing with sullen, intractable temperaments that can turn on a dime back to attitudes resembling what their parents most wish for.  And then, long periods of absenteeism, when the children they know, love and are so familiar with are suddenly replaced by some aliens that must have been booted out of outer space.

So, there it is, pretty well official.  Researchers at Harvard Medical School have concluded from the results of a study based on in-person interviews with over ten thousand adolescents from ages 13 to 17, that some eight percent of these semi-children-partial-adults somehow managed to meet the criteria for "intermittent explosive disorder".  Aptly enough shortened to "IED", an acronym better known as 'improvised explosive device', famously used by terrorist Taliban in Afghanistan against NATO troops.

It's not that Western teens huddled with Eastern terrorists to come up with a strategy to confound and conflict with the norms, values and expectations of the society in which they come to maturity.  But perhaps there is something in common between the mental state of teens coping with hormonal changes and disgruntled, given-to-violence young men living in the east who resent the presence of foreigners insistent that they put a halt to inhumane treatment of others.

Sometimes it does seem to parents that their offspring behave in truly inhumane ways toward them.  All that suffering caused by such disparate and deep-seated differences of opinion - is it all really necessary to achieve eventual adulthood on the part of the emerging adults, and eventual white-flag-waving-exhaustion on the part of their miserable parents?

That aside, the researchers estimate that nigh on six million young people in the U.S. alone are affected by this 'disorder'.  Critics of the findings think otherwise, that it appears more as though adolescents are simply doing what adolescents do; rage because nothing seems to be going right for them, until such time as they manage to maintain an even psychological equilibrium.  And that the researchers are "manufacturing" an "epidemic".

Bu the study was published in the journal of Archives of General Psychiatry, giving it at the very least an aura of respectability.  "If we can detect IED early and intervene with effective treatment right away, we can prevent a substantial amount of future violence perpetration and associated psycho-pathology", according to the senior author, professor of health care policy at Harvard.

Ah but, counters Dr. Allen Frances, former chair of the psychiatry department at Duke University's School of Medicine who chaired the task force that wrote the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the IED theory is an "unstudied", furthermore "inherently unreliable" category that should not be in the DSM at all.

So there.  Kids will be kids.

And so they should.