WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- I recently read an article about a
nationwide poll of parents with mentally troubled children. More
than half said their pediatrician or family physician never asks
about their child's mental health.
This got me wondering: If our children are as over-medicated as
we hear they are, who is over-medicating them? Their own doctors
are not even asking about their mental health.
Are psychiatrists writing all of these prescriptions? Maybe.
However, when parents are worried enough about their child's mental
state to bypass the pediatrician and go straight to the
psychiatrist, maybe the child does have a mental illness that needs
medication.
According to the surgeon general, 10 percent of our children
suffer from a serious emotional or mental disorder.
This makes the poll's findings especially puzzling -- and
disturbing.
Of the 1,473 parents questioned in the C.S. Mott Children's
Hospital National Poll on Children's Health, 56 percent said they
are never asked about their child's mental health. One in five
parents has trouble finding specialty care, mostly because it is
difficult to find and expensive.
It is not surprising that many pediatricians and family
physicians don't ask. It took the psychiatric community until 1980
to recognize depression as a childhood illness. Before then it was
widely believed that children could not suffer from depression.
But 30 years later, many pediatricians and family physicians are
still missing out on a great opportunity to diagnose and treat a
child's mental health condition before it gets out of control. By
then the condition is obvious and the medication is necessary.
There is plenty of data on the dramatic rise in prescriptions
written for children with mental health problems. There is also
plenty of data on the dramatic rise in prescriptions written for
men with erectile dysfunction. That does not mean men with ED are
overmedicated. It means there have been dramatic advances in drug
treatments that make people's lives better.
Let's not forget that prescribing mental health drugs is a
hit-or-miss pursuit. It can take a lot of prescriptions to find the
right one for one child.
Are these drugs over-prescribed? Sure. Are parents of these
children underserved? Absolutely. So we can blame the doctors for
not asking enough questions of the parents or the parents for not
asking enough questions of the doctors.
Or we can stop passing around blame and just agree to ask more
questions -- all of us.
Christine Stapleton writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail:
christine(underscore)stapleton@pbpost.com. To read previous
columns, go to PalmBeachPost.com/depression.
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