The article on the growing mental health disorders in children and youth cites health professionals as dividing problems into four main categories of “anxiety, depression, addiction and attention deficit disorder,” but these categories likely never exist separately: depression involves anxiety and attention deficit, and may involve an addiction of one kind or another, or the reverse.
It's also often the case of a square peg in a round hole, or defining problems as separate from the environment that may very often produce it. Is it always better for a child or adult to fit into a family or society whose values he or she does not share, as in, to use an extreme example, a Mafia family?
The Diagnostic Manual of Psychiatric Disorders lists hundreds, including, ‘shyness’ and just recently removed homosexuality as a mental disorder. But my philosophy professor at university told the class he had first intended to major in psychology until he found the claims made were unproven and improvable and ‘evidence’ involved circular argument.
In spite of serious ambiguities, thousands of Canadian and U.S. children were and are treated with the drug Ritalin simply because of a bad fit with the ‘normal’ school system, and the overworked, stressed teachers who can't cope with them. Many of them could possibly have the condition – not disease or disorder – of Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism which is becoming almost epidemic and must certainly involve toxic environmental chemicals.
Children in Britain are now diagnosed as “potential” misfits of one type or another including criminal, as young as age three. We should be just as concerned with authoritarian, pre-fascist societies as we are with mental illness in individuals. Hundreds of orphans in Quebec in the ’40s and ’50s were judged mentally ill because the state paid institutions $10 per head more: the lobotomies performed on many of these children can only be seen as guinea-pig type experimentation.
While most psychologist/psychiatrists are ethical, it only takes a few of the wrong sort to do a great deal of harm. Close supervision is needed to prevent fraudulent claims and treatment (see the Sept. 5 Journal story, ‘Hobo scientist’ hailed as Canadian trailblazer and the medical establishments are not up to it (see Sept. Walrus article, Dr. Shock).
In any case, a different, more human system is called for, one that offers choice, teaches mental, intellectual and emotional self-sufficiency and stresses self-esteem, that much-disparaged quality, but one that is essential to personal and societal well-being when combined with social responsibility.
Also let's forget the idea that the experts know it all and that mental health is a function of DNA: we are all vulnerable, and that includes “the experts.”
Doris Wrench Eisler, St. Albert
