It has been estimated that each year, over one million children in the United States are misdiagnosed with a mental illness that could be better explained by trauma. That’s a lot of children inaccurately being labeled with a mental illness. The problem of misdiagnosis is important. If we misdiagnose or mislabel a child with a mental illness, we run the risk of recommending or providing treatment that will potentially not alleviate or address the child’s core problems.
For example, one child displays many attention problems at school. He is diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and treated with a stimulant medication. It works great. A second child also is showing attention problems at school, but the stimulant medication doesn’t seem to be working as well for her.
When looked at more closely, it turns out that the second child has a traumatic/chaotic past and horrifying current living situation, causing many of the same attention problems exhibited by the first child. In this case, the second child may not need the stimulant medication. She needs the trauma at home to be addressed. Clearly the two children have different needs, which require different treatment, even though at first glance they appear similar.
[For more of this story, written by Matthew M. Leahy, go to http://psychcentral.com/lib/wh...in-children/00021494]
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