Child psychiatrists are debating what to do about a glaring 40-fold spike within a decade in the number of youngsters diagnosed with bipolar disorder. A panel of the American Psychiatric Association has concluded that many of these children may have been misdiagnosed, and that they are suffering instead from another mood disorder more likely to evolve into adult depression or anxiety. The panel is calling for a new diagnosis for children who have chronic irritability and recurrent temper outbursts.
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Comments
It's too bad that this generation is drugged.
Good to see attention given to something that truly is a large cultural concern. Although the debates about diagnosis names sound like ingroup fighting to most people, the outcome has consequences for too many ordinary people for it to be ignored. There probably have been too many young people given too many drugs, and too many wrong drugs, over the past couple of decades. This is very much driven by the health insurance industry, which is interested in treating as cheaply as possible. Dr. Frances, from Duke, is right to be cautious about a new diagnosis. But it is also easy to see how too many young people have been tagged with the bipolar label in the wake of the MGH work.
Accurate diagnosis is essential in managing any form of mental illness, but I worry that anxiety and depression will be over-diagnosed so as to avoid legitimate diagnoses of bipolar, schizo-affective, or schizophrenia disorders. For children, the symptoms are more overlapping than they are for adults. The PIER program in Portland, Maine and similar groups are especially skilled in helping parents manage early developing mental illnesses.
The driving force behind children being diagnosed with mental disorders is the misdiagnosing by accomodating physicians (family visits = ca$H) and secondly, the Social Security checks issued to the parents due to the diagnosis of their children's diagnosis, plus, the extra funding dispersed to the schools who oversee the education of the children.Follow the money: it's all about the dollar$.
That is like complaining about insulin use by type I diabetics. For an individual with a psychotic illness, anti-psychotic medications make all the difference in the world.
When you have a child smashing the walls of your house because he or she thinks there are bugs in them as a result of psychosis-induced hallucinations, then you can get back to me about how useless these diagnoses are.
This is Big Pharma at work! Bipolar Disorder (a physiological descriptor) used to be called Manic-Depressive Disorder (a behavioral descriptor) until the Reagan administration gave Big Pharma a free hand in 1980. Before 1980, mental health issues were handled by mental health clinicians not physicians.
Have you ever dealt with individuals suffering the disorder, whatever you want to call it?