Baby Psych

Losing Our Sanity, from Cradle to Couch {Excerpts]
Tana Dineen, PhD
 
Michael S. Scheeringa, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane Medical School in New Orleans [and others], have lowered the bar on another disorder once reserved for adults. He believes that children as young as infants can suffer not only from depression but even from post-traumatic stress disorder. Alicia Lieberman, director of the Child Trauma Research Project at San Francisco General Hospital, agrees, citing PTSD as a cause of something she calls "post-traumatic play."
 
Mental health workers have fallen victim to the notion that they have the uncanny ability to detect mental illness in infants just by looking at them and imagining what they are thinking. Depressed babies, according to Alice Sterling Honig, professor emeritus of child development at Syracuse University, "look listless, with dull eyes, as if they gave up looking for their special person." Babies as young as four months, she believes, show "signs of stress seen in much older people."
 
The infancy advocacy group Zero to Three offers a handbook for psychiatrists and psychologists to strengthen their position and support their practice. With the awkward title: "Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Development Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood," it lists all possible (and imaginable) diagnoses and their symptoms. Modeled on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, it treats infants and children as miniature adults prone to the same types of disorders identifiable in their moms and dads.
 
Are any of these opinions and assessments reliable? Or are they just another sign of a mental-health industry that wants to expand its influence and prosperity?
 
With each month and year that passes, the confidence of child experts in their ability to diagnose grows as does their list of publications which fosters the impression that they really do know what they’re doing. Yet it all hangs on something akin to mind reading, guessing and proselytizing.
 
Who knows whether a "listless look" indicates depressive thinking or just a full stomach or a gas pain? Or whether anhedonia is something that toddlers feel or adults imagine? Or whether frequent night wakings in infants are a sleep disorder or just an exhausting parental nuisance?
 
Perhaps the answer can be found in the nature of the treatment, one that relies heavily on medications. A recent survey of pediatricians, by Carol Rosen of Case Western State University, finds that 75 per cent of them prescribe sleeping medication for young children although such practice is not approved. And, although drugs such as Prozac have not been approved for infants and young children -- which means there is no evidence that they are safe in the long term -- tiny dosages mixed with pabulum are being readily prescribed. Possibly, all of this is just a marketing tool to create infant mental illness as a niche, a new area in which to claim expertise (http://www.pamweb.org/losingsanity114.html).