Are We Fabricating Mental Illness?

The mental health field is labeling children rather than helping them. They’re controlling children rather than thinking about their mental health. As parents it’s our responsibility to build our children’s mental health, not control them. We can learn to do exactly that.

Timestamps:  

00:00 Huge increase in the diagnosis of mental health problems.  

01:10 The negative impacts of a diagnosis of ADHD and other behavioral disorders.  

02:17 The factors Mental health professionals say are not being recognized.  

04:02 Everybody is missing the real problem: a lack of love.  

06:08 Medications control children, not make them happy. 

Transcript: 

The Dangers of Labeling a Child with a Mental Health Problem 

According to a 2019 study in the Journal of Pediatrics, the incidence of anxiety, behavior disorders, and mood disorders in adolescents had DOUBLED over the previous decade. 100% increase in 10 years. Isn’t that an epidemic?

According to the CDC, the number of children with ADHD increased by 70% in 20 years, now at 13%. Some predict an incidence of 50% within 25 more years. That is simply phenomenal growth, with effects that I maintain are far worse than those of COVID-19, for example.  

People vastly under-estimate what happens to a child who is given a diagnosis of ADHD or another mental health problem. Often for the rest of their lives:  

1. They are labeled and thereby separated emotionally and physically from kids who are “normal.” 
2.  They use their diagnosis as an excuse for the rest of their lives, so they don’t ever have to be responsible for their feelings or behavior. YES, sometimes they really DO have a diagnosis that affects their behavior, but it is FAR more common for their diagnosis to be wrong, and for it to be used as an excuse. 
3. Their parents use the diagnosis as an excuse for doing their own work in learning how to love and teach their children.  

In other words, accepting a diagnosis of ADHD or other disorder can be a terrible mistake. An increasing number of health care professionals are recognizing that these following factors are not being recognized:  

1. Mental health professionals are diagnosing the children with mental health problems without even assessing what role the parents might be having. They dispense pills and prescribe behavioral therapy without even pausing to suggest that parents are the ones who need to learn and change. This is like assessing the health of a plant without analyzing soil or water factors.  
2. The diagnoses are being made by a wide variety of therapists with great variety of training, some not so skilled.  
3. The criteria for these disorders are often very vague and loosely applied. 
4. Mental health professionals have to make a living, so they benefit from diagnosing children with mental health disorders.
5. NONE of these mental health professionals or parents has the slightest understanding of Real Love, so children are being assessed as having a DIAGNOSIS when the only real problem is their lack of love. Everybody is missing the real problem. Everybody.  

Mental Health Problem or Lack of Love? 

Briefly consider the following questions:  

• Psychologists diagnose children but do not diagnose teachers and curriculums as insufficiently interesting to maintain attention. Before you treat a child with powerful stimulants, you might ask whether a debilitating lack of love and teaching would give you six varieties of inattention too, and probably qualify you with a diagnosis of ADHD or anxiety or whatever. 
•  The grab bag of supposed symptoms of the disease amounts to a description of the average boy’s behavior in the average classroom before the era of school psychology: “often fidgets” or “squirms,” “often leaves seat,” “often runs about,” “often talks excessively.” These aren’t symptoms of an illness. They are symptoms of being a normal human child in PAIN. Do we think about that? 
• Are we enforcing reasonable behavior by medication? Are we parenting by pill?  

School psychologists may not themselves prescribe medication but often encourage its use and direct parents to prescribing physicians.

The diagnoses provided and medications encouraged by child psychologists are devoted largely to getting students to sit quietly and still, goals formerly pursued by the cane or the knuckle-rap.

It’s a new form of school discipline, one that leaves parents certain that their children are diseased, and that quickly leads the children to the same conclusion about themselves. 

The mental health field is labeling children rather than helping them. They’re controlling children rather than thinking about their mental health.  

As parents it’s our responsibility to build our children’s mental health, not control them. We can learn to do exactly that.  

Mr. Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., and is author of “Entanglements: A System of Philosophy.” 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-psychologists-cause-mental-illness-11621548927 

May 20, 2021