Thursday, November 17, 2011

“The Avoidable Death of Rebecca Riley”


In this chapter, Ronson explains how many diagnoses made the DSM could be inaccurate. Tired of psychoanalyst, David Rosenhan got a few of his friends to go to mental institutions and be labeled insane for hearing voices, although they were sane. Rosenhan then declared that they were all faking and shook the industry to its core.  Robert Spritzer, editor of the DSM-III, reinvented the diagnoses of mental illness as we know it. He began to categorize mental illness in a completely different way, making checklists for all mental illness. However, the DSM-III was bought more by the average citizen than actual psychiatrists had and the era of over-diagnosing began. There has been an extreme uprising is the diagnoses of autism, attention deficit, and childhood bipolar. Ronson then speaks to Bryna Hebert, who truly believes both of her kids are bipolar, and David Shaffer, who believes it does not exist and they kids actually ADD. Finally, Ronson depicts the story of possible misdiagnosed four-year-old Rebecca Riley, who overdosed on her bipolar medication of 10 pills a day.
At the end of everything, I completely agree that a lot of kids are over-diagnosed. It’s crazy that kids who are hyper should be tagged as bipolar and ADD for the rest of their loves. While I believe there are some kids who have ADD, it is nowhere near as many as there are prescriptions for Adderall and Ritalin out there. That being said, I do not believe in labeling kids as bipolar. It is a terrible stigma to carry for the rest of your life and, until you reach adolescents and it can be clearly seen that the child is not just acting out, it should never be placed on a child.
Also, what is up with that book!?!

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