Psychiatrists insist: one in five children has a mental disorder or problem

A few weeks ago it was held in Madrid on XVI World Congress of Psychiatry and one of the topics they discussed is that of childhood, a stage of life in which psychiatrists assure, as I read on ABC, that 20% of children have a mental disorder or problem, which usually happens before the boys or girls turn 14 years old.

Apparently, psychiatry professionals consider that with such numbers there are many differences worldwide in relation to the distribution of professionals who care for people with mental health problems, causing inequalities as there are countries with few psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and psychiatry nurses.

So far I can agree, because there is nothing worse than having many children with problems and that there is not enough staff to assist them. The problem is that to see a problem in this fact I should accept the premise that says that one in five children has a mental problem and I still do not accept it. I don't think this is true.

Those invented or magnified problems

Do not ask me why, but I just remembered Estivill, the author of books as well known as the "Fall asleep, child" that, with the most controversial behavioral methods (for letting the child cry to get him to stop asking for company at night), he manages to cure childhood insomnia, which he explains affects 35% of children under 5 years old.

Given these figures I wonder: how did our parents, our grandparents and their ancestors with 35% of children under 5 who could not sleep? Because at that time there was neither "Fall asleep, child" nor was there a book to teach the child to sleep.

Perhaps they let them cry, but without the theory, or perhaps they simply accompanied them to be calm until, when they were older, they slept well. Or better, maybe those figures did not exist, because some children sleep better, others sleep worse, but no one considered that a child had insomnia, but "the child who has the most sleep and the one who wakes the most times has touched" , come on, a normal child like everyone who needs a little more patience. And most likely these children with more difficulties at the level of sleep did not reach 35%. Is it not that the crazier the functioning of our society is, the more affected are the children and that is why there are more children who sleep worse?

Similarly, isn't it that there are now more children with behavioral problems because they live in a society with absurd functioning? Because we all know about Children who cry out for help through bad behavior. They live badly, they have problems, they do not accept the destiny that has been imposed on them and their escape valve, their way of complaining, is behaving badly. Others do not even have an escape valve and end up exploding with anxiety crisis. And others not even that, direct to a depression that leads them to live a life they hate when they have not yet reached almost adolescence.

Problems are solved by going to the root

Well, they will forgive me, but providing the world with more psychiatrists and professionals dedicated to mental health may be necessary, I do not say no, but it is still a patch. If the problems have to be fixed at the root, it may be necessary treat parents, that we are often more concerned in trying to repair our wounds and deficiencies than in giving our children the love and time they deserve.

Maybe who should be treated is to our government and to the banks, which have allowed and promoted, including corruption, that ordinary workers pay their crisis, leaving us in very difficult situations at the labor level. Or maybe to the psychiatrists, who are able to say that 1 in 5 children have mental problems or disorders and stay so wide.

Because it is impossible. 20% of children are many children. In my class we were 40, because according to statistics 8 they had problems or a mental disorder. lie, unless mental disorder is to look at the ceiling because the history teacher is so stale that there is no one who deigns to listen to one of his classes.

But I don't know what I miss. The cake is getting smaller and everyone wants their little piece. Nowadays everything is done business, even health business is done, drowning the public health system, cutting and shrinking, so that people start jumping into private medicine where they will leave the money.

Well, in this of psychiatry, the same thing: we say that there are many children who are wrong, we complain because there are not enough professionals, we get more and more and we start to consult all those children who really have nothing or whose problems are not really psychiatric, but a normal response to an abnormal world.

Video: Imagine There Was No Stigma to Mental Illness. Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman. TEDxCharlottesville (March 2024).