Rating: 
Summary: save our kids from peter breggin!
Review: What Breggin says might be true of some children but he is wrong to make it a blanket statement. I have worked in schools for many years and yes, I have seen parental problems ignored or skirted out of misplaced diplomacy. Certainly, there are times when, for example, anxiety is caused by an emotionally abusive parent and the child is treated medically instead of the family being treated therapeutically or some other way. However, it is downright abusive to deny proper treatment to children with genuine physically-generated psychiatric problems. I worked in a school with an eight-year-old kid who had real psychotic episodes, and the family wouldn't medicate him. How can it be better for him to be hallucinating, trying to kill himself, and physically attacking others, than to take an anti-psychotic medication that could help him? Children with real psychiatric problems are miserable. To pretend that their problems stem from character flaws on the part of the children or their parents, is not only to deny them the genuine help that can be provided by appropriate medication and treatment, but to add insult to injury and risk complicating their problems with depression and suicidally low self-esteem. Yes, it can be difficult to tell the difference between parental-induced problems and physiological brain disorders, but a good clinician will devote him- or herself to making this differentiation and to helping children the best way possible. New technology is allowing psychiatrists to actually use brain-imaging techniques to see where, precisely, a person's brain is malfunctioning, and to target that problem with the appropriate medication. ADD and other problems clearly show up in these brain images. Peter Breggin is a Christian scientist driven by the ideological obsession that medication is bad under all circumstances. This is simply wrong. Each situation must be evaluated separately, and the priority should not be ideology, but rather the health and well-being of the child. Medication is sometimes appropriate. You wouldn't deny a child glasses and tell him that courage and determination will allow him to see perfectly. No more should children or parents be told that psychiatric problems are a character defect. Shame on Peter Breggin for misleading millions and condemning their children to suffer needlessly.
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