Doctors under pressure to label bookish children as mentally ill'

[Theseus]

I know it's behind a Paywall, but have you seen this article in the Times? www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/news/article4125848.ece

The new president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists sounds a bit ill-informed: ' â??Certain behaviours carry stigma and thereâ??s less stigma if itâ??s associated with a disorder. Often itâ??s about the avoidance of guilt. You get obvious pressure from parents: weâ??ve all been to middle-class dinner parties where so many parents seem to say their kids are mildly autistic and yet theyâ??ve just got into Oxford. And you think, â??I donâ??t really buy that oneâ?? . . . Itâ??s interesting that many of these disorders are more common in the private sector of education.â??
He added: â??When did you last hear a kid called bookish or shy? At what point do those normal traits become social phobia or Aspergerâ??s, or when does a naughty kid become ADHD? Now those are socially defined, and where psychiatry sits on those is often not where the public think.'

[TheOneAndOnlyAlpha]

In my psych degree classes we were told that through assessment based on DSM-IV (as it was then) everyone will be diagnosed with a MH issue. So the class were all assessed and we ALL came out with a diagnosis. ASD, anxiety and depression mostly. I personally had a mild borderline personality

[JaneParker]

He is a wise man. He is not saying no one has any psychiatric condition. He is just saying the range of normal is large. Obviously if you think your child has such problems it needs help get it but the new US tests seem to render such a huge percentage of people as needing help that that becomes counterproductive although very good news for Big Pharma.

[ParsingFlatly]

Um, Simon Wessely may well say "that we need to be focusing on providing services, not applying labels", but he alternates it with trying very, very hard to apply the label "psychiatric" (or rather "psycho-social", is the current buzzword) wherever he can squeak it in. Some of his writings on Gulf War syndrome are embarrassingly contrived, and I've noticed him making a land grab for fibromyalgia and even period pain.

I guess he has different answers for different audiences.

And frankly, the "Wessely School" are the part of the problem for the prestige of psychiatry. When researchers state in their papers that, "We didn't bother with placebos: they're not relevant to psychiatry," they're behaving like homeopathists, not scientific researchers in evidence-based medicine.

And then they wonder why other areas of medicine look down on them...

[ParsingFlatly]

In fact "startling lack of sense and knowledge" pretty much sums up some of his stuff I've had the disconcerting experience of reading.

It's like Gove, but for medicine.