It is not just parents, but politicians, courts, journalists, police, teachers, and PR flacks that promote the greatest boondoggle in history, i.e. psychiatry and psychology. Private funding is bad enough. But use of taxpayer funds for this useless treatment is a waste of taxpayer funds. Who else predicts the future and gets paid with taxpayer funds and never held accountable for their errors?
[From article]
Although there’s no gainsaying their ubiquitous popularity. Individuals, medicos, public schools and scores of government agencies aggressively push counseling sessions and “evaluations,” recommended drugs, support groups and other metal health therapies. And as far as I can understand they do so in the smug assurance that what they’re advocating is a modern science. After all everybody knows we’ve come light years in managing a child’s adjustment to life from the “dark ages” of only a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago when mental professionals and their programs and treatments did not exist.
[. . .]
Madame Curie went to pieces at age sixteen with what we’d now diagnose as Clinical Depression (major depressive disorder). George Patton couldn’t read and write until he was nine or ten. Albert Einstein was a late-talker, Teddy Roosevelt was puny and asthmatic when younger and was treated by inhaling the smoke from strong cigars. The author of perhaps the greatest novel written in English, Middlemarch, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) was so ugly at age five that even though she was a girl her father felt compelled to invest in her education. But when she died the main reason she was denied a burial in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey was because of her torrid extra-marital love affair with George Lewes. And then there’s the fact that late in life the ugly duckling also managed to attract a husband twenty years her junior. Finally we come to Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) who was so bullied in school that today it would have meant the criminal prosecution of school staff, not to mention years of therapy in order to exorcise those demons.
[. . .]
Children born in 1800, 1850 or 1900 almost universally faced conditions and dealt with problems today’s child-care mental health “experts” consider debilitating and yet persevered. Indeed may not have given these conditions much thought because nobody was throwing them in their face week after week year after year asking them how they felt or offering drugs. Offering them only “treatment,” not a cure for bad memories or physical and emotional problems. Let’s be clear about that because as a psychologist once told me in a rare moment of honesty “we [his profession] no longer talk about cure – only treatment.”
[. . .]
Indeed one could consider the difference in self-confidence between children now and in the “dark ages” and convincingly argue that Teddy Bears have done more for children than every child psychologist, child therapist, children’s support group or parenting “expert” who ever opened a case file.
[. . .]
[as I ask repeatedly]
So why do we keep listening to these people?
[. . .]
In large part it’s because parents are reluctant to believe that “normal” behavior or physicality in children extents over such a broad range. That it includes children reading at either two or ten, the really pretty and well, the pretty. It includes late-talkers and early bloomers, emotionally strong and the emotional. In short that children aren’t identical hothouse roses but instead a bouquet of variegated wildflowers.
[. . .]
And then there is the ugly fact that in the age of science many parents cannot stop themselves from measuring their child against benchmarks thought up by academics or parenting “experts” whose personal standard of success (if we look), is often how well their one thirty something darling is doing in drug rehab this time around.
[. . .]
Measuring encouraged by “professionals” in state departments of education who make a career telling parents what skills their children should have at one age or another. And from innumerable “studies” which purport to define normal behavior and skill levels by age and sex but which only provide the tools necessary to bludgeon credulous parents into obtaining “treatment” for their child in any area in which they may not today, assess as well as their peers. Anger management, sleep deprivation, hyperactivity, over eating, undereating, self-esteem, feelings of loss from divorce, a trace of dyslexia, depression, delayed learning, any number of fears whether morbid or otherwise. A “treatment” for every human condition imaginable except a “treatment” for too much “treatment” (although I may be wrong in this.)
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/teddy_bear_therapy_versus_the_mental_health_professionals.html
January 16, 2016
Teddy Bear Therapy Versus the Mental Health Professionals
By Richard F. Miniter
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