Pathological Child Psychiatry And The Medicalization Of Childhood

Currently, it is common practice among the child psychiatric establishment to prescribe powerful and potentially addictive drugs to children who have emotional or behavioural problems. Pathological Child Psychiatry and the Medicalization of Childhood is a strong challenge to this way of thinking. Sami Timimi uses a wide variety of sources that shape our understanding including his personal experiences to highlight the role of culture, beliefs, science, social hierarchy and power, in shaping our understanding of childhood problems and how to deal with them. He urges professionals who work with children to question their assumptions in a manner that will enable them to access a greater variety of potentially helpful therapeutic frameworks. Since the 1960s, psychiatry has had to learn to accommodate critical analysis of its beliefs and methods. The legitimacy of its core assumptions continues to be questioned. Now child psychiatry too must engage with such a debate, if it wishes to develop into a genuinely democratic and inclusive profession. Pathological Child Psychiatry and the Medicalization of Childhood will be of great interest to professionals and trainees in psychiatry and child psychiatry, social work, family therapy and other psychotherapies for children and adolescents.

Now in a fully revised and updated second edition, this authoritative text integrates state-of-the-art theory and empirical research on a wide range of child and adolescent disorders. Featuring contributions from leading scholars and clinicians, the volume is notable for its comprehensive coverage of the biological, psychological, and social-contextual determinants of childhood problems. Each chapter focuses on a specific disorder, describing its characteristics, developmental course, and epidemiology; outlining current diagnostic and classification schemes; identifying risk and protective factors; and discussing implications for prevention and treatment. Including a new chapter on adolescent substance use disorders, the second edition has been updated throughout to reflect important advances in the field. Incorporated is emerging knowledge in the areas of neurobiology, genetics, developmental psychology, and emotions, as well as new findings on sex differences in psychopathology and long-term outcomes for children at risk.

Psychiatry and psychology have constructed a mental health system that does no justice to the problems it claims to understand and creates multiple problems for its users. Yet the myth of biologically-based mental illness defines our present. The book rethinks madness and distress reclaiming them as human, not medical, experiences.

This book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency. Examining representations of cruel young people in popular texts and popular culture, the collected essays demonstrate how gender, race, and class influence who gets labeled 'cruel' and which actions are viewed as negative, aggressive, and disruptive. It shows how representations of cruel young people negotiate the violence that shadows polite society, and how narratives of cruelty and aggression are used to affirm, or to deny, young people’s agency.

'This book provides a succinct overview of issues relevant to understanding and supporting pupils with ADHD. It is well written and includes authentic case studies... The real strength of the book is in its careful consideration of how collaborative working can enable youngsters with an ADHD diagnosis to get the best out of their education. Ideas outlined are practical but are also based on careful thinking about effective models and approaches to intervention... an excellent starting point for anyone embarking on research related to educational provision for pupils with ADHD' - SENCO Update 'In many ways this publication reads like a toolkit, and as such offers a range of practices that may be considered in order to improve outcomes for all. A readable and supportive book' - SNIP Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) can be hard to include in a mainstream classroom, and managing their behaviour is often a challenge. Drawing directly from real classroom experience, this book shows how to use effective management strategies to improve behaviour in the classroom and at home. This interdisciplinary approach will provide teachers with: " strategies to deal with disruptive behaviours " ways to channel children's positive characteristics " advice on how teachers can support and guide parents " behaviour management techniques to promote positive behaviour " advice on collaborative working, and how teachers can build partnerships with other professionals.

This handbook synthesizes and integrates the science of internalizing and externalizing childhood disorders with the diagnostic structure of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual – 5th Edition (DSM-5) of the American Psychiatric Association. It offers a comprehensive overview of DSM-5 disorders in childhood, covering etiology, symptom presentation, assessment methods, diagnostic criteria, and psychotherapeutic and pharmacological approaches to treatment, prognosis, and outcomes. Clinical vignettes and empirical insights illustrate key concepts and diagnostic and treatment issues such as developmental, cultural, gender, and other considerations that may influence diagnosis and case formulation. In addition, chapters on psychosocial therapies offer robust guidelines for working with children and adolescents with DSM-5 disorders. The Handbook also addresses the shift from categorical to dimensional, diagnostic, and treatment systems, particularly focusing on the current shift in funded research in childhood disorders. Topics featured in this Handbook include: Intellectual disabilities and global developmental delay. Depressive disorders in youth. Posttraumatic and acute stress disorders in childhood and adolescence. Autism spectrum and social pragmatic language disorders. Alcohol-related disorders and other substance abuse disorders. Parent-child and sibling relationships. Cognitive-behavioral interventions and their role in improving social skills. The Handbook of DSM-5 Disorders in Children and Adolescents is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as clinicians, professionals, and scientist-practitioners in clinical child and school psychology, pediatrics, social work, and educational psychology.

Offers an introduction to the sociology of diagnosis. This title presents articles that explore diagnosis as a process of definition that includes: labeling dynamics between diagnoser and diagnosed; boundary struggles between diverse constituents - both among medical practitioners and between medical authorities and others; and, more.

A key theme of this book is that we urgently need a therapeutic ethos in order to bring both educational and therapeutic sensibilities to bear on the issue of children's wellbeing, if truly effective and appropriate policy responses to the current malaise are to be fashioned. Not least, we must pay particular attention to childhood experience, showing that scientific and technical developments are always secondary to the resources of the human soul, if we are to minimize the extent to which today's children will need therapy as adults. This will entail moving beyond narrowly mechanistic definitions of, and ways of thinking about, "well-being" and the psychological therapies. This book offers pointers to the kinds of arguments that can inform what is rapidly becoming a central concern of politicians and policy-makers.