Are kids being over-diagnosed with mental illnesses?

The issue with over-diagnosing mental illness is specific to those who aren't mental health experts. Jerry Bubrick, PhD, explains that we need to be particular on who diagnoses and prescribes medicine for mental disorders.

Transcript

00:00

JERRY BUBRICK: Anybody who has kind of any contact with a kid can technically say that kid has OCD or that kid has ADHD.

00:07

As a field, we have to be tighter about who is diagnosing. [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:18

I think it's an interesting topic. I think that there's no question that sometimes, the field will

00:25

overdiagnose people. But the field is a broad definition. It's a broad range of professionals, pediatricians,

00:35

neurologists, teachers, social workers, psychologists, anybody who has kind of any contact with a kid can technically say,

00:45

that kid has OCD or that kid has ADHD. There's a lot of times we get cases where teachers will say--

00:51

that parents will come in and say, the teacher thinks that my child has ADHD. So we have the benefit then of saying, OK, well,

00:59

let's really systematically look at it. Let's use the rating scales. Let's look at the symptoms. Where is it happening? Could there be something else that could be explaining it?

01:07

Whereas if the parent, instead of coming into a professional or psychiatric or mental health care professional, went to the pediatrician,

01:15

pediatrician could say, well, yeah, it sounds like ADHD. And here's medicine for it. So I think, as a field, we have to be tighter

01:22

about who is diagnosing and who's prescribing these medicines.