Kids Caught in the Psychiatric Maelstrom: How Pathological Labels and "Therapeutic" Drugs Hurt Children and Families

(Hardback)

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This book offers a warning that American children are receiving increased chemical treatment from psychiatrists and provides a primer on how to improve the emotional health of kids without drugs. "Maelstrom" is an apt metaphor for the inexorable deterioration many children experience inside the mental health system. Kids Caught in the Psychiatric Maelstrom: How Pathological Labels and "Therapeutic" Drugs Hurt Children and Families challenges current treatment practices and addresses the critically important issue of excessive prescribing of psychiatric medications to children. This encyclopedic work reveals "inside the system" information, emphasizing the theoretical divide at the root of the controversy over diagnosis and treatment. It explains how the 1990s, "decade of the brain" replaced talk therapy with biochemical treatments, leading to the hegemony of the pharmaceutical industryand subsequently the massive drugging of children. Author Elizabeth E. Root details common diagnoses and treatments, explaining up-to-date brain research, with some surprising interpretations, and noting dangerous national precedents to mental screening. Finally, she illuminates pathways toward solutions and healthier families, sharing nonpsychiatric explanations for the nation's increase of troubled children and the rationale and research supporting non-drug, alternative approaches to childhood distress.

Reviews

Writing for parents and caregivers, Root, a retired clinical social worker, criticizes treatment practices of children with psychiatric conditions and addresses the issue of excessive prescribing of medications. Noting the supposed increase in mental illness in children, she asks whether they are really mentally ill and whether the care provided to them is really helpful. She discusses medical and psychosocial treatment models and how they influence a therapist's attitude toward a patient; the history of ADHD, neurobiological theories, and critiques of them; myths about bipolar disorder; the increase in psychopharmacology, the pharmaceutical industry, types of drugs, and their safety; screening of children and the lack of an objective screening method; and non-drug alternative solutions. * SciTech Book News *

Author Bio

Elizabeth E. Root, M.S.W, M.S. Ed., is a licensed clinical social worker, now retired, whose employment spanned five counties of upstate New York.