Are Our Chidlren Really So Mentally Unwell?

UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images 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.” For those with tweens and teens, this might seem obvious. For those with younger ones, buckle up. In Yang’s story, she focuses on the role schools play. 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; and of course changes within the Mental Health Industrial Complex. It’s this last piece that Dr. Sami Timimi, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychotherapist at the National Health Service in the United Kingdom is focused on. He's the author of six books including Naughty Boys: Anti-Social Behavior, ADHD, and the Role of Culture and his most recent book, Searching for Normal , which pr…