Are Our Chidlren Really So Mentally Unwell?

"In a New York Time ideas story that ran this past week, Jia Lynn Yang opens with a bang: "One of the more bewildering aspects of the already high-stress endeavor of 21st-century American parenting is that at some point your child is likely to be identified with a psychiatric diagnosis of one kind or another. Many exist in a gray zone that previous generations of parents never encountered.""

"Failures in education may lead to an increase of psychiatric diagnoses like ADHD - alongside IEPs or maybe medications - as a means to catch up kids who are being lost in crowded, test-reliant, merit-funded schools. Of course, even Yang points out that schools are only one part of the puzzle. There's screens and social media taking over our emotional lives and psychiatric development; the pandemic's long-felt chilling effect on socialization; the adult world of division and anger in politics and everywhere else;"

Rising rates of psychiatric diagnoses in children are linked to multiple social and systemic factors. School systems that are crowded, test-focused, and merit-funded can produce learning gaps that prompt diagnoses, IEPs, or medication to compensate for lost students. Digital technologies, social media, pandemic-driven reductions in socialization, and heightened adult sociopolitical division also shape children's emotional development. Changes within clinical and commercial mental-health systems influence diagnostic practices and interventions. Calls for reframing understanding of mental health emphasize demystifying diagnoses, recognizing neurodiversity, and developing community- and education-centered responses rather than defaulting to medical labeling or pharmacological treatment.

Read at Fatherly