From Your Health Journal…..”I had to promote a great article in the New York Post written By Dr. Allen Frances entitled A disease called ‘childhood’. Do 1 in 5 NYC preteens really suffer a mental woe? Recently, The New York Post reported that more than 145,000 city children struggle with mental illness or other emotional problems. n the last 20 years, rates of attention deficit disorder have tripled, while autistic disorder and childhood bipolar disorder have each increased by a remarkable 40-fold. In the article, Dr. Allen makes a very important statement by declaring human nature just doesn’t change that quickly, but the labels follow fashion and can escalate dramatically without there being an actual increase in symptoms. Our kids haven’t suddenly become sicker, it’s just that diagnoses are applied to them more loosely. This article is a must read. I encourage all of you to visit the New York Post web site (link provided below) to read the complete article.”

From the article…..

Do 1 in 5 NYC preteens really suffer a mental woe? A psychiatry expert argues we’re overdiagnosing —and overmedicating — our kids

Last week, The Post reported that more than 145,000 city children struggle with mental illness or other emotional problems. That estimate, courtesy of New York’s Health Department, equals an amazing 1 in 5 kids. Could that possibly be true?

There is nothing tougher in psychiatry than accurately diagnosing a mental disorder in a pre-teenager. It is so easy to make mistakes both ways — to miss problems that desperately need attention and to attend to problems that are better left alone.

Getting the right diagnosis and predicting its future course is especially difficult in kids because their symptoms have such a short track record and are often heavily influenced by transient factors like developmental differences: family, school and peer stress; and the use of drugs.

It usually takes a while before an illness declares itself — and often, it turns out that no diagnosis is necessary because the symptoms go away without intervention.

That said, there’s been a massive mislabeling of psychiatric diagnosis among children because of recent medical fads.

In the last 20 years, rates of attention deficit disorder have tripled, while autistic disorder and childhood bipolar disorder have each increased by a remarkable 40-fold.

Human nature just doesn’t change that quickly, but the labels follow fashion and can escalate dramatically without there being an actual increase in symptoms. Our kids haven’t suddenly become sicker, it’s just that diagnoses are applied to them more loosely.

Some of the broadening usefully captures missed cases, but there has been a big overshoot because of aggressive drug-company advertising. Once the adult market was saturated, pharmaceutical manufacturers turned their greedy attention to kids and began a sometimes illegal campaign to convince doctors, parents and teachers that every childhood problem is a mental disorder, the result of a chemical imbalance that requires a pill solution.

To read the full article…..Click here