Medicalizing youth
I get the New York Times European newsletter each morning, which is a fine news source as long as you’re critical and treat it with some level of skepticism. On the same day these two stories arrived:
- The Teen Mental Health Industry Is Failing Them, which tells the horrendous tale of how patients are treated at in-patient mental health centers. This is a for-profit industry growing wealthy at essentially incarcerating teenagers who don’t fit in.
- Health Panel Recommends Screening All Kids 8 and Up for Anxiety, which tells how every kid should be screened for depression and anxiety so they can be rushed into treatment.
We seem to never learn, or at least don’t do so when there’s money to be made. The early treatment protocols for Covid such as unnecessary intubation likely led to many otherwise preventable deaths, but the bias of the Western medical system is that doing something is better than doing nothing.
When you start testing teenagers constantly for depression and anxiety, you’re going to get a lot positives that are just part of normal teenage life. Now these kids are going to be whisked into the mental health system, medicated until they’re numb and told they have “mental health problems” for the rest of their life.
I didn’t see any mention of restoring normal childhood: more funding for school sports and activities, gym class every year of school, urban infrastructure that lets kids walk and bike around safely, reducing exposure to sensationalist media (such as the NYT…) or enacting reasonable gun-control measures so that school shootings go back to a once in a decade rarity.
Instead the vision of childhood many American progressives seem to have is one whereby kids are almost always confined to the indoors (it’s not safe outside!), constantly in front of a device (whether they are doing classes via Zoom or meeting with their medical practitioner) and heavily medicated.
No wonder the kids aren’t alright.