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Weighing Your Options
An Excerpt From Should I Medicate My Child? Sane Solutions for Troubled Kids With and Without Psychiatric Drugs
By Lawrence H. Diller
le, energetic, strong-willed, obsessive, fearful, shy, listless or remote, or she may have difficulty forming normal relationships with other people. If you are a parent of such a child, you have probably sought out and received plenty of advice, none of it entirely successful and some of it disastrous. By the time parents arrive in my office, they have usually run through a series of approaches: time-outs, negotiation and compromise, reward systems, reassurance and so on. The parents are worried, naturally, about their child's mental health and prospects for the future. Will she struggle with this problem throughout her life? Will it ultimately keep her from getting a good job or making a happy marriage? What will happen to her self-esteem?
Often parents experience battle fatigue; it's common for them to feel guilty and confused or angry at the not-so-subtle sense of blame imposed on them by schools and other parents. They often feel tyrannized by their child's problems and long for escape. "I'd love to spend a week, no, a month, on a deserted island," one mother told me, "the circles under her eyes were like blue half-moons." These fantasies, which are perfectly normal, can be terribly distressing for parents, who may fear that they indicate a secret lack of commitment to their child. Parents who have reached this point often come to me because they know that I am licensed to prescribe psychiatric drugs to children and have many years of experience doing so. On the first visit they usually ask, "Does my child need medication?" There is no easy answer to that question.
If you are reading this book, the prospect of giving psychiatric
