Bipolar Today

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Independent Online has recently written an article about last year’s BBC documentary “Louis Theroux: America’s Medicated Kids”. The documentary explores the question of whether or not treatment of ADHD and now bipolar disorder in children is an attempt to medicate away children’s personalities, rather than to actually provide them with help for an actual mental illnesses. You can find more information about the documentary itself on the BBC website here.

Analysis

Since I haven’t yet had a chance to watch the documentary, I won’t comment on the documentary itself here. I’m glad to have found out about it, and will report on it in my section on resources when I have. Instead, I’m more interested in the way that the documentary is being reported. On the one hand, the report is a good example of the way in which complex psychological problems tend to get boiled down to simplistic dualities.

For instance, in Tonight, we see the following comment: “Theroux asks whether Americans have started to medicate the personalities of their children as much as their medical conditions.” In the BBC coverage of its own documentary, it says that Theroux is trying to “answer the question of whether the latest pharmaceuticals are taking the place of old-fashioned parenting.”

This kind of reporting seems to be an almost overt attempt to create a false dilemma for the sake of creating conflict. Unless bipolar disorder in children is a complete sham, surely the question is at best to what extent medication is taking the place of parenting. By creating a false dilemma like this, it creates the assumption that, if one accepts that any children can have bipolar disorder and need medication, one is somehow buying into some social “trend” to medicating the personality of children.

This does a disservice to people with children who are actually wresting with psychological problems, treating them as some sort of vanguard of some social irresponsibility movement. I know that in my own case, I started developing serious behavioral and mood problems when I was around seven years old. It wasn’t full-blown bipolar disorder, but in retrospect, it was certainly connected. I don’t know if I could have benefited from medications, but what I do know is that the question of whether or not I should have been medicated should not be connected to some broader false dilemma about social irresponsibility.

Related posts:

1. “Locked Up and Forgotten” in Uganda
2. Bipolar Children May Assess Faces Differently
3. Chronic Pediatric Irritation Not Bipolar Disorder: ECNP
4. BC Hospital Opens Clinic For Youth Taking Antipsychotics
5. Abilify Approved in Canada for Use in Some Teens