Young People and Mental
Health
Fries with those double standards sir?
Friday/16/Nov 2007 Filed in:
Misc
I was in the dog park
yesterday with a woman who I’d not met before who had a young staff
called Boris. As Boris repeatedly and enthusiastically tried to
convince my dog of the advantages of male only friendships – with
some success - she explained to me that Boris was “a nightmare” and
that she was trying to get her vet to give him “something like
Ritalin” as that had done wonders with her son. I asked how old her
son was – she said he was 18 now and doing well. He’d had some
problems with drugs last year but that was all over now and he was
in college doing GCSEs.
This made me think about our desperate search for a psychopharmacological solution to everything. While not for one minute disputing that some parent have great difficulties with some children (maybe that should read ‘most’ and ‘most’!), and that some children experience distress and unhappiness as a result of behaviours and symptoms that we now attribute to the somewhat subjective diagnosis of ADHD, I think as the BBC Panorama programme this week pointed out, we may be getting this out of proportion. Read More...
This made me think about our desperate search for a psychopharmacological solution to everything. While not for one minute disputing that some parent have great difficulties with some children (maybe that should read ‘most’ and ‘most’!), and that some children experience distress and unhappiness as a result of behaviours and symptoms that we now attribute to the somewhat subjective diagnosis of ADHD, I think as the BBC Panorama programme this week pointed out, we may be getting this out of proportion. Read More...
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