Book Review by Susan Resko, Executive Director

Susan Resko, M.M.
The Balanced Mind Foundation Executive Director

I’m often asked how I can both raise a child with a mood disorder AND work for The Balanced Mind Foundation.  My answer is that I compartmentalize my life, which includes delegating the dozens of book reviews The Balanced Mind Foundation is asked to do each year.  I cherish my 20 minutes each night before I nod off to sleep and save that time for books I want to read that have nothing to do with psychiatric illness.

I made an exception with Judith Warner’s We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication. The New York Times best selling author’s newest book premise intrigued me. Warner set out to write a book with the working title, Affluent Parents and Neurotic Kids; the premise of which was that today’s helicopter mothers are overanalyzing, overpathologizing and overmedicating their kids in order to boost their performance, get them into better schools and avoid the unpleasant parts of parenting. 

However, when she launched into the project, Warner discovered just the opposite. She heard heart-breaking stories about severe childhood mental illness that made her weep.  She had not set out to write about “real” childhood mental illness. She wanted to expose the pseudo, flavor-of-the-month kind of childhood mental illnesses, like the huge increase in pediatric bipolar disorder.  She assumed this just could not be real.  But, she couldn’t find stories about the diagnosis-du-jour kind of bipolar, only real kinds of bipolar, Asperger’s and ADHD stories.

What I love most about this book is that she didn’t abandon the project for lack of material.  She used the material she found (and can be found each day in the dozens of The Balanced Mind Foundation support group postings.)  Instead of looking for evidence to validate her bias, as so many media outlets have done with the tragic Rebecca Riley case, she changed the entire premise to report what she had learned.  Wow, how often does that happen? That’s why this book broke through the clutter for me!

Warner dives into many of the issues that confront The Balanced Mind Foundation parents each day, including:

• the double-whammy stigma of not only having a family member with a psychiatric illness, but a CHILD. (Children don’t have mental illness unless they were abused, right???);
• the sad lack of care for the mentally ill which goes back to the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s;
• the Church of Scientology’s views on psychiatry and its influence on public misperceptions;
• the dearth of pediatric mental health professionals and the almost non-existent use of evidence based treatments for children.

Instead of condemning the alleged overmedication of children, she relates stories of parents who spend thousands of dollars on unproven treatments out of desperation, and asks why society vilifies this illness which impacts 1 in 4 Americans at some point in their lives?

Conflicts of Interest

I don’t think that she got it quite got it right in Chapter 6 when she discusses industry payments to child psychiatric researchers and the potential for conflicts of interest. She doesn’t fully investigate why the congressional and media lens is so acutely focused on child psychiatry and less so on other pediatric diseases which garner more sympathy, such as cancer or AIDS.  (Hmmm, could it be their anti-psychiatry bias?) Nor does she indicate if she attempted to contact the academic institutions of the child psychiatrists in question to learn if the allegations of underreporting pharmaceutical support were indeed proven to be accurate. Despite this, I think this book is the equivalent of a farm team rookie hitting a grand slam in the majors; as an unaffected parent who was previously biased against our plight, she gets it right AND admits that she was previously wrong.  Impressive!

Recommendation

It goes without saying that I endorse We’ve Got Issues. But, I’m also suggesting that you do more than just read it. Order the book through this link.  (In the interest of full disclosure, The Balanced Mind Foundation will receive approximately 4% of the purchase price; it’s not much, but every little bit helps!) Donate it to your local library. Give it to any parent, grandparent, teacher, neighbor or doctor who doesn’t “get it.” Even if you have to deliver it anonymously, send it to someone with a little note asking the recipient to re-consider his/her views on children’s mental health. (I guarantee it will give you a small, guilty pleasure.) More importantly, it will help enlighten those who most need to learn not to judge our kids or our plight as parents.

Disclosure:  The Balanced Mind Foundation neither seeks, nor accepts support from the pharmaceutical industry.

The Balanced Mind Foundation is inviting Judith Warner to discuss her book with our parents: stay tuned for further details. 

When you order products via any of the Amazon.com links on thebalancedmind.org, The Balanced Mind Foundation will receive between 4-7% of the purchase price.