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. In this video, HealthMaker Jerry Bubrick, PhD, explains that we need to be particular on who diagnoses and prescribes medicine for mental disorders.

Transcript

00:00

[MUSIC PLAYING] Anybody who has kind of any contact with a kid can technically say that kid has OCD or that kid is ADHD.

00:07

As a field, we have to be tighter about who is diagnosing.

00:18

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

00:27

but the field is a broad definition. It's a broad range of professionals.

00:34

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

00:43

can technically say that kid has OCD or that kid is ADHD. There's a lot of times, we get cases where teachers

00:51

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

00:58

OK, well, let's really systematically look at it. Let's use the rating scales. Let's look at the symptoms. Where is it happening?

01:04

Could there be something else that could be explaining it? Whereas, if the parent, instead of coming into a professional, a psychiatric or a mental health

01:12

care professional, went to the pediatrician, a pediatrician could say, well, yeah, it sounds like ADHD and here's medicine for it.

01:19

So I think, as a field, we have to be tighter about who is diagnosing and who's