Is Child Mental Illness Worsening Or Is the Definition Expanding?

We would all agree that child mental health is an important issue in society. Recent trends might lead us to believe that mental illness is on the rise, and that modern “science” is now properly labeling the countless “mental disorders” that children, adults and the elderly exhibit, but were previously misunderstood. For example, children are known to have higher energy and activity levels, shorter attention spans, difficulty learning, uncontrolled emotional tantrums, fears, and shyness. In the past we just let children grow up; but now these behaviors are labeled psychiatric disorders of one kind or another, and the children drugged to “fix” them. No one knows the long-range effects of the new powerful anti-psychotic drugs not even tested on children. But Ritalin and some of the earlier drugs have proven to stunt body and skull growth – directly countering a child’s health. Nevertheless, these and the newer more powerful drugs are freely prescribed to children younger than four and through the teenage years, as being necessary for child mental health.

Schools have become clinics to the degree that many teachers no longer improve teaching methods, but instead chalk up problem behavior to “disorders”, sending students to the school nurse for a meds prescription. Is this helping children and schools? Quite the contrary: medicated children zone out, literacy levels and test scores have dropped drastically, and tragic violence has plagued schools where students are on these powerful “meds”.

One writer for a prominent mental health magazine points out that the problem is not related to mental health at all, but to an ingenious million-dollar marketing campaign by drug manufacturers. After successfully lobbying for legalized drug advertising, and by paying psychiatrists to promote and prescribe their drugs, sales are literally skyrocketing. The public mistakes marketing for science, buys what is being sold, and government hands over billions of dollars annually for psychotropic drugs prescribed to foster children, the military, the elderly, and prisoners. Interestingly enough, a major pharmaceutical company producing one of the top-selling anti-psychotic drugs, has placed research and development under their Sales and Marketing division. Accordingly, drug studies are now paid for by the pharmaceutical industry itself, which profits from bringing them to market. Science is obviously being compromised, because investigations discover skewed test results covering up harmful results, and miracles being claimed about drugs that worked no better than sugar pills. But then again what would one expect from a commercial marketing department?

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