In a fiery interview with Northwestern professor Christopher
Lane, journalist Phillip Dawdy explains his belief that parents need to stop
trusting that the doctor knows best when it comes to mental health diagnoses of
young children. I offer his arguments here for discussion’s sake, with the
caveat that neither I nor Dawdy are pediatric psychiatrists—but he at least has
spent many years researching the field.
In 2005, at least 2.2 million American children were being treated for mental health disorders, a number that has skyrocketed in the last decade and a half. And in 2007, 23 babies
less than one-year-old were prescribed antipsychotics. “The drugs are
known to cause huge problems in adults, so why the heck would a doctor give
them to little kids, especially infants?” Dawdy asks. Remember the tragedy of
four-year-old Rebecca Riley, who died of an overdose of antipsychotic drugs
after she was diagnosed bipolar at the age of two?
Dawdy argues that there is no solid research to support
early intervention for kids at risk of psychosis: “[T]he PRIME study at
Yale—which sought to identify kids at risk of psychosis and then gave them
Zyprexa to prevent psychosis from ever arising—was an epic failure and
certainly raised questions about the ethics of giving kids dangerous drugs for
disorders that they, at least in some of the cases, didn't even have.”
Zyprexa is a drug used to treat bipolar disorder. Dawdy
blames pharmaceutical companies pushing the drug for the marked increase in
diagnoses of what’s known as bipolar II disorder. Unlike true manic depression,
which involves episodes of extreme mania, anyone who experiences depression
with “bursts of energy” can now be diagnosed with bipolar II (and prescribed Zyprexa).
That sounds to Dawdy (and to me, someone who has struggled with depression) a
lot more like simple depression than manic depression, a serious diagnosis that
can lead to social ostracizing and inability to find a job.
Much of Dawdy’s distrust of the increased medication of
children and teens is rooted in cross-cultural comparison. “In France and Italy, ADHD is rarely diagnosed and
it's difficult to see where French and Italian culture have suffered as a
result. As for bipolar disorder in kids (meaning pre-teens and younger), it's
simply not an issue in the rest of the world. The bipolar child is a purely
American phenomenon.”
Do you have any experience with children who have benefited or
suffered from early mental health treatment?
Image: patriciaebauer.com
