Bad Therapy Step 7: Drug ‘Em.
First comes diagnose, then comes medicate. But if Lexapro, Ritalin, and Adderall were the solution, the decline in youth mental health would have ended decades ago.
Altering your child's brain chemistry is about as profound a decision as you'll ever make as a parent. But for many child psychiatrists and far too many pediatricians, it involves little more than a pro forma signature and tearing off a sheet gummed to a prescription pad.
Steven Hollon holds a named professorship in psychology at Vanderbilt University, where he studies the etiology and treatment of depres-sion. "You want to be very careful starting children and adolescents on antidepressants," he told me. He's even more adamant about antianxiety medicines like Xanax and Klonopin. "Anything that makes you feel better within thirty minutes is going to be at least psychologically and physiologically addictive, and it probably is going to be both."
If you read “The Collapse of Parenting,” by Leonard Sax, a real physician, he describes the same issue, where parents are looking for a quick fix for their child and are just seeking a prescription to solve the problem. The real problem is exactly what the title of his book is - The Collapse of Parenting.
When you don’t put your trust in Allah, you will feel empty inside, and you will never be able to deal with what life throws at you. Whatever happened to saying "Bismillahi, tawakkaltu 'alallah, wa la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah," which translates to "In the name of Allah, I place my trust in Allah, and there is no power or might except with Allah?"
I used to dispense these medications on a daily basis to many young teenagers, and each prescription comes with a mandatory handout describing all of the risks of many antidepressants, with a lot of side effects ironically being the exact opposite of what the drug is meant to cure. The number one problem to look out for with antidepressants?
A black box warning that tells you - an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, particularly in children and adolescents.
Even if your child doesn’t experience this side effect, the damage that can happen can last a lifetime:
But possibly the grimmest risk of antidepressants, antianxiety meds, and stimulants is the primary effect of the drugs themselves: placing a young person in a medicated state while he's still getting used to the feel and fit of his own skin. Making him feel less like himself, blocking him from ever feeling the thrill of unmediated cognitive sharpness, the sting of righteous fury, an animal urge to spot an opportunity—a romance, a position, a place on the team-and leap for it. Compelling him to play remote spectator in his own life.
Many adults, accustomed to popping a Xanax to get through a rough patch, are tempted to extend that same accommodation to their suffering teen. But the impact of starting a child on psychotropic medication is incomparably different. Every experience of a child's life—so many "firsts" —will now be mediated by this chemical chaperone: every triumph, every pang of desire and remorse. When you start a child on meds, you risk numbing him to life at the very moment he's learning to calibrate risks and handle life's ups and downs. When you anesthetize a child to the vicissitudes of success and failure and love and loss and disappointment when he's meeting these for the first time, you're depriving him of the emotional musculature he'll need as an adult. Once on meds, he's likely to believe that he can't handle life at full strength — and thanks to an adolescence spent on them, he may even be right.
If you can relieve your child's anxiety, depression, or hyperactivity without starting her on meds, it's worth turning your life upside down to do so.
Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
First comes diagnose, then comes medicate. But if Lexapro, Ritalin, and Adderall were the solution, the decline in youth mental health would have ended decades ago.
Altering your child's brain chemistry is about as profound a decision as you'll ever make as a parent. But for many child psychiatrists and far too many pediatricians, it involves little more than a pro forma signature and tearing off a sheet gummed to a prescription pad.
Steven Hollon holds a named professorship in psychology at Vanderbilt University, where he studies the etiology and treatment of depres-sion. "You want to be very careful starting children and adolescents on antidepressants," he told me. He's even more adamant about antianxiety medicines like Xanax and Klonopin. "Anything that makes you feel better within thirty minutes is going to be at least psychologically and physiologically addictive, and it probably is going to be both."
If you read “The Collapse of Parenting,” by Leonard Sax, a real physician, he describes the same issue, where parents are looking for a quick fix for their child and are just seeking a prescription to solve the problem. The real problem is exactly what the title of his book is - The Collapse of Parenting.
When you don’t put your trust in Allah, you will feel empty inside, and you will never be able to deal with what life throws at you. Whatever happened to saying "Bismillahi, tawakkaltu 'alallah, wa la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah," which translates to "In the name of Allah, I place my trust in Allah, and there is no power or might except with Allah?"
I used to dispense these medications on a daily basis to many young teenagers, and each prescription comes with a mandatory handout describing all of the risks of many antidepressants, with a lot of side effects ironically being the exact opposite of what the drug is meant to cure. The number one problem to look out for with antidepressants?
A black box warning that tells you - an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, particularly in children and adolescents.
Even if your child doesn’t experience this side effect, the damage that can happen can last a lifetime:
But possibly the grimmest risk of antidepressants, antianxiety meds, and stimulants is the primary effect of the drugs themselves: placing a young person in a medicated state while he's still getting used to the feel and fit of his own skin. Making him feel less like himself, blocking him from ever feeling the thrill of unmediated cognitive sharpness, the sting of righteous fury, an animal urge to spot an opportunity—a romance, a position, a place on the team-and leap for it. Compelling him to play remote spectator in his own life.
Many adults, accustomed to popping a Xanax to get through a rough patch, are tempted to extend that same accommodation to their suffering teen. But the impact of starting a child on psychotropic medication is incomparably different. Every experience of a child's life—so many "firsts" —will now be mediated by this chemical chaperone: every triumph, every pang of desire and remorse. When you start a child on meds, you risk numbing him to life at the very moment he's learning to calibrate risks and handle life's ups and downs. When you anesthetize a child to the vicissitudes of success and failure and love and loss and disappointment when he's meeting these for the first time, you're depriving him of the emotional musculature he'll need as an adult. Once on meds, he's likely to believe that he can't handle life at full strength — and thanks to an adolescence spent on them, he may even be right.
If you can relieve your child's anxiety, depression, or hyperactivity without starting her on meds, it's worth turning your life upside down to do so.
Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
The Amish.
Back in my jahiliyah days, I would consider the Amish as weird and nonconforming.
"Why do they isolate themselves and not want to be like everyone else?"
"Why do they restrict themselves and make life harder for themselves?”
I don't believe in their religious beliefs, but I have much respect for them standing up for what they believe in, and there's many lessons we as Muslims can learn from their ability to establish thriving communities among themselves who hold onto their values.
Back in my jahiliyah days, I would consider the Amish as weird and nonconforming.
"Why do they isolate themselves and not want to be like everyone else?"
"Why do they restrict themselves and make life harder for themselves?”
I don't believe in their religious beliefs, but I have much respect for them standing up for what they believe in, and there's many lessons we as Muslims can learn from their ability to establish thriving communities among themselves who hold onto their values.
Who needs people when you can have pets?
Bentley’s new concept vehicle:
Bentley’s new concept vehicle:
Within its cabin, the design approach is just as forward-thinking. Created using virtual reality (VR) software to enable customers to see and experience a wider variety of possible configurations, it mixes familiar contemporary physical car interior features like luxury seating, wing-shaped dashboard, steering wheel, dials and switches with spellbindingly futuristic digital elements that can be brought to the fore or melt away into the background as driver mood or functional need requires.
The package is unusual for featuring three seats and three doors – rather than four or five of both – to afford greater luxury in transit for the special few and includes innovative in-cabin storage for treasured pets and/or hand luggage as well. When stationary even the boot space can take on a dual role as upmarket picnic seating.
Even if this concept doesn’t make it to production, the signs are clear:
Why have kids when you can have treasured pets?
Birth rates are declining all over the world, and one of those reasons is because of materialism.
“More for me and less to spend on someone else.”
Muslims of course are not immune to this trend, with women for some reason requiring a higher education costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that would require years to pay off before she can even think of having children - aka, true wealth.
Bad Therapy Step 6: Dispense Diagnoses Liberally
This one really irks me:
Your five-year-old son wanders around his kindergarten classroom distracting other kids. The teacher complains: he can't sit through her scintillating lessons on the two sounds made by the letter e. When the teacher invites all the kids to sit with her on the rug for a song, he stares out the window, watching a squirrel dance along a branch. She'd like you to take him to be evaluated.
And so you do. It's a good school, and you want the teacher and the administration to like you. You take him to a pediatrician, who tells you it sounds like ADHD. You feel relief. At least you finally know what's wrong. Commence the interventions, which will transform your son into the attentive student the teacher wants him to be.
The crazy thing is, this is normal behavior for a 5-year old, especially boys who mature later than girls, and are just more hyperactive compared to girls. To turn him into a docile robot is to do injustice to him if you ask me, especially when you consider the side effects of these drugs because once you have ADHD, you will be medicated.
The classroom has goals to meet, and if kids are making the teacher lose progress because they’re just being normal, they have to be “taken care of.”
It’s like kindergarten mafia, expect you don’t get whacked, you get drugged.
I remember a similar situation reading “The Collapse of Parenting,” where the author (Dr. Leonard Sax), would be surprised by how often parents were trying to find a fix for their teenager with medication, when the problem was the teen had a TV in his room and unlimited access to video games, making him play through the night and consequentially, sleepy and inattentive at school. The medicine did make him more attentive, but he lost that “glint in his eye.” Essentially, what the parents were saying was he lost that thing that made him human.
Sometimes people do have real issues like dyslexia, but don’t go shopping for diagnoses till you get the answer you want. Sounds a lot like fatwa shopping.
But l've also talked to parents who went diagnosis shopping-in one case, for a perfectly normal preschooler who wouldn't listen to his mother. Sometimes, the boy would lash out or hit her. It took him forever to put on his shoes. Several neuropsychologists conducted evaluations and decided he was "within normal range." But the parents kept searching, believing there must be some name for the child's recalcitrance. They never suspected that, by purchasing a diagnosis, they might also be saddling their son with a new, negative understanding of himself.
Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
This one really irks me:
Your five-year-old son wanders around his kindergarten classroom distracting other kids. The teacher complains: he can't sit through her scintillating lessons on the two sounds made by the letter e. When the teacher invites all the kids to sit with her on the rug for a song, he stares out the window, watching a squirrel dance along a branch. She'd like you to take him to be evaluated.
And so you do. It's a good school, and you want the teacher and the administration to like you. You take him to a pediatrician, who tells you it sounds like ADHD. You feel relief. At least you finally know what's wrong. Commence the interventions, which will transform your son into the attentive student the teacher wants him to be.
The crazy thing is, this is normal behavior for a 5-year old, especially boys who mature later than girls, and are just more hyperactive compared to girls. To turn him into a docile robot is to do injustice to him if you ask me, especially when you consider the side effects of these drugs because once you have ADHD, you will be medicated.
The classroom has goals to meet, and if kids are making the teacher lose progress because they’re just being normal, they have to be “taken care of.”
It’s like kindergarten mafia, expect you don’t get whacked, you get drugged.
I remember a similar situation reading “The Collapse of Parenting,” where the author (Dr. Leonard Sax), would be surprised by how often parents were trying to find a fix for their teenager with medication, when the problem was the teen had a TV in his room and unlimited access to video games, making him play through the night and consequentially, sleepy and inattentive at school. The medicine did make him more attentive, but he lost that “glint in his eye.” Essentially, what the parents were saying was he lost that thing that made him human.
Sometimes people do have real issues like dyslexia, but don’t go shopping for diagnoses till you get the answer you want. Sounds a lot like fatwa shopping.
But l've also talked to parents who went diagnosis shopping-in one case, for a perfectly normal preschooler who wouldn't listen to his mother. Sometimes, the boy would lash out or hit her. It took him forever to put on his shoes. Several neuropsychologists conducted evaluations and decided he was "within normal range." But the parents kept searching, believing there must be some name for the child's recalcitrance. They never suspected that, by purchasing a diagno-sis, they might also be saddling their son with a new, negative understanding of himself.
Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up