Tag: children and mental health

The reporter explains how air and water pollution affect our brains, why children are so vulnerable, and what to do about it.

Around the Web: A newspaper investigation discovered that the state continued to pay psychiatric residential treatment facilities millions when they repeatedly broke rules meant to ensure children's safety and well-being.

This series of thirty video interviews with leading experts from around the world is designed to help parents better understand how to raise strong, resilient kids and how to deal with the pressures exerted on them by the current dominant “mental disorder” paradigm. We hope that this interview series will provide helpful ideas that you may not be able to get anywhere else. The interviews can be found HERE.

Study suggests interparental conflict causes lasting damage in the way children are able to recognize and process emotions.

From The Guardian: The number of children and young adults experiencing mental health problems is rapidly rising. More than ever, young people are growing up in...

From Greater Good: According to pediatrician Claudia Gould, parents and professionals can better understand children's behavior by paying attention to the meaning behind it. "In a...

In the couple of years since my daughter Rebecka and I published our book, I have received many emails, Facebook messages and phone calls from despairing parents. They want to know, how did you get through it? What do you suggest? What else can we try?

The time has come that the fictitious ADHD qualifies for my ‘Enough is Enough’ series. It’s time to stop addressing pharmaceutical psychiatry on its own terms: its fraudulent and corrupt 'science,' its spurious 'evidence base,' and its imaginary psychiatric ‘diseases.’ I’m done with this. The evidence is in. Let’s get real. Psychiatry has become a profession of drug pushers. As a psychiatrist I am beyond troubled. Let’s get real.

Fierce Pharma reports: "Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) is fighting more than 1,500 legal claims that its antipsychotic Risperdal triggered breast development in boys, and...

The general theme, that various "mental illnesses" are being "overdiagnosed" is gaining popularity in recent years among some psychiatrists, presumably in an effort to distance themselves from the trend of psychiatric-drugs-on-demand-for-every-conceivable-human-problem that has become an escalating and undeniable feature of American psychiatric practice. But the implicit assumptions – that there is a correct level of such labeling, and that the label has some valid ontological significance – are emphatically false.

At the risk of stating the obvious, ADHD is not an illness. Rather, it is an unreliable and disempowering label for a loose collection of arbitrarily chosen and vaguely defined behaviors. ADHD has been avidly promoted as an illness by pharma-psychiatry for the purpose of selling stimulant drugs. In which endeavor, they have been phenomenally successful, but, as in other areas of psychiatry, the hoax is unraveling.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that, three years into an Australian study that is following 178 children with ADHD and 212 children without ADHD, the...

A study of 378,881 subjects aged 4-17 years by the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database found that the likelihood of receiving an ADHD diagnosis and treatment was...

The New York Times considers new research from Taiwan that suggests the possibility that the relative neurocognitive immaturity of younger children in a school cohort,...

London's Telegraph reports: "Despite the fact that Ritalin, which works by stimulating a part of the brain that modifies mental and behavioural reactions, is...

The future of mental health interview series continued this past week with interviews with Peter Kinderman, president-elect of the British Psychological Society, on the efforts of the British Psychological Society, Jed Diamond on individual psychotherapy, Ruth Folit on healing through journaling, Shawn Rubin on gender diversity issues, and Marilyn Wedge on reclaiming childhood.

“No, cortisol in hair can’t ‘reveal future mental health risk’ in children.” HealthNewsReview gives a low rating to a recent story in the Guardian that reported that cortisol levels in children’s hair might be a useful mental health screening tool.

The Guardian covers research out of Australia that found that levels of the “stress hormone” cortisol in the hair of 70 nine-year-old children corresponded to the number of traumatic events experienced by the child. “Childhood is an imperative and sensitive period of development, and when things go wrong it can have lifelong consequences, not just on mental health, but also on general health.”

Citing a 43 percent jump since 2003, researchers estimate that 5.8 million school-aged children and teens in the US now have an ADHD diagnosis, a staggering 12 percent of this population. The new NIH-funded analysis also found that the percentage of girls diagnosed with ADHD was up 55% and that the percentage of Hispanic children diagnosed shot up 83% over the same timeframe.