— as King Henry might have said if he’d been around today to watch the entire nation go the way of Alexandra, Virginia, where forty percent of the population is currently on antidepressants. Who told so many people that, whatever they were experiencing, they had to take pills of uncertain utility and serious side effects? Possibly for years?
Despite escalating outrage and dismay at hugely growing numbers of Americans being told they are mentally ill and must be medicated, the psychiatrists who have just completed the latest DSM (the medical and insurance establishments’ official list of mental disorders) stuffed it full of yet more ways for us to think of ourselves as mentally ill.
Inevitably, those among us even somewhat eccentric are increasingly unprotected from pharma’s it’s a mad mad mad mad world business model. Children are especially vulnerable; they must rely on the common sense and protective instincts of their parents to keep doctors like Kajoko Kifuji from laying waste to them.
We all know about the hundreds of thousands of twitchy little boys who are having ADHD meds thrown at them; we should also, as UD‘s pal Allen Frances points out, think about gifted kids, whose sometimes unusual affect also excites the madness mongers. He quotes an expert on gifted children: “When pediatric diagnoses are carelessly applied, gifted children are frequently mislabeled with ADHD, autistic, depressive, or bipolar disorders.”
March 16th, 2013 at 10:17PM
CNN is on the case.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/16/health/mental-illness-overdiagnosis/index.html
March 17th, 2013 at 6:44AM
kids with developmental disabilities, sometimes due to poor attachments, who have not learned social skills like patience, empathy, and or to tolerate frustration will also end up mislabeled and mis-medicated.