Is Your Child's Behavior Actually a Sign of Neuroinflammation?

"Our children are sitting in therapy offices with inflamed brains. Psychiatrists are prescribing medications for immune-driven symptoms. Parents are being counseled on behavior while their child's immune system attacks the brain. This is not rare. This is systematic. The mental health system is structurally designed to miss neuroimmune disease, not because clinicians are incompetent, but because the diagnostic framework itself cannot see what it was never built to recognize."

"For example, a mother brings her 12-year-old daughter for a psychiatric evaluation. The intake focuses on family stressors, school functioning, trauma history, mood patterns, and behavioral challenges. What the therapist does not ask is equally important. No one asks whether she was recently sick. No one asks about tick exposure, sudden cognitive slowing, episodes where she seems disconnected, or rages that look panicked rather than oppositional."

The mental health system routinely routes children with brain inflammation into psychiatric care without evaluating infectious or immune causes. Standard intakes and diagnostic frameworks omit questions about recent illnesses, tick exposure, sudden cognitive slowing, episodic disconnection, fluctuating symptoms, or panic-like rages. Clinicians trained in psychopharmacology or psychotherapy lack immunology training and operate within protocols that cannot detect neuroimmune disease. As a result, immune-driven brain disorders are treated as primary psychiatric problems, medications are prescribed, and behavioral counseling is emphasized while the underlying immune process progresses. Structural diagnostic blind spots, not clinician incompetence, underlie these systematic misdiagnoses.

Read at Psychology Today