We find medical conditions hard to really solve. Most people just can't begin to cope with a medical explanation of mental issues in terms of seeing it as treatable. That's a concept not even in its infancy. We've barely conceived it. It is still gestating.
Also, with the psychosocial explanations, there is an element of blaming someone or something else. Most people will feel they are the victim of something unjust and that resonates with many people.
Mental illness typically has both components. Family is known to compound mental health issues that have a biological component.
My sister minored in psychology in college and took some graduate courses in it later. She once told me "We must not have the genes for schizophrenia or someone in the family would surely have it given how the family operates" and then talked about how schizophrenics go do inpatient therapy, get better, go home to the nutso family and get worse again.
I think we need better parenting resources for families dealing with neurodivergent offspring. I've seen time and again that parents don't know effective means for dealing with such kids and it actively creates problems which then become very intractable.
I'm good at that and did some work for a time with a related organization and spent a few years trying to figure out how to blog about such subjects. That never really got traction. Articles like this give me a twinge of regret and guilt that I never figured out how to more effectively share what I know. I'm convinced that better parenting resources for difficult kids would really make a difference in the world.
But, I just don't have a path forward. You need fertile ground for such seeds to take root and I've never found that, basically. Then I got badly burned by someone who used information in my parenting blog to manipulate me and it's a case of... Whatever. Not my problem.
>My sister minored in psychology in college and took some graduate courses in it later. She once told me "We must not have the genes for schizophrenia or someone in the family would surely have it given how the family operates" and then talked about how schizophrenics go do inpatient therapy, get better, go home to the nutso family and get worse again.
It is said that if C-PTSD was correctly diagnosed, the DSM manual would shrink to a small booklet. At lest 85% of the mentally ill suffered some kind of abuse according to a recent study, and since the parents know they can't do anything that leaves physical marks, many smarter people get more creative - teaching them things wrong, or not at all; ordering them to do something, then punishing them for doing it; (or a semi famous case of a man who was among other things deathly afraid of water, because his father's punishment of choice was spraying him with a hose) etc. All that while maintaining the image of a sweet person outside home, so that nobody trusts the victim, because it's "impossible" that such a nice man/woman would do something like that to their child...
It's doubtful there is a biological component at all, since the Nazis killed off most of the mentally ill in some parts of Europe, but the prevalence rates remained unchanged.
I'm all for freedom, but there should be ways to remove the child from their parents when it's being raised in some nonstandard, and clearly dysfunctional way. There should also be some equivalent of witness protection that would give the people a new identity. Once it gets known the person is "mentally ill" people will harras them, try to convince them of nonsense (or that some common knowledge is actually false) for the kicks, or otherwise "gaslight" them, (well knowing that nobody will trust the person) so there is no way they could get better with such a label at home.
I used to participate in the online gifted community and was somewhat respected as a knowledgeable person with good ideas. As such, people would email me and talk to me about their parenting challenges. So I got to talk to a fair number of parents who were at wit's end. In many cases, I was able to help them untangle their mess.
A common theme is that bright toddlers can wind up with screwy ideas because of being bright toddlers. They are just smart enough to leap to ridiculous conclusions based on partial information and incomplete mental models.
For a time, my oldest was deathly afraid of ladybugs. We lived on the third floor and there was a tall tree just outside his window. He ended up with yellow and black ladybugs in his bedroom.
He was terrified. I laughed about it, but shut the door and let him sleep in my room. I couldn't understand why he was so afraid of these harmless insects, but I respected the fact that he was.
Years later, he was able to tell me what he couldn't articulate at the time of the incident: because they were yellow and black and he knew bees were yellow and black, he was convinced they were bees. He couldn't explain how he knew the color while having no idea they looked nothing like bees.
When he was about seven, he similarly reacted with terror to rolly pollies. They are completely harmless.
So I collected a few up and put them in a dish with lettuce. I figured he was mistaking their antennae for mandibles, and he was. He thought they would bit him.
I told him they eat plants and showed him the chewed lettuce. I explained the antennae were how they smelled. They were not for biting. I held them in my hand and showed my son "See, they are smelling me."
He got over his fear of these harmless bugs. His fear was based on incorrect conclusions due to partial info and the ability to make inferences.
After providing the right mental models to some parents, they were able to help their children also let go of phobias based on similar circumstances.
But most parents don't have access to those mental models. Instead, they are given models that make the problem worse.
Humans are not going to stop having a childhood phase. We aren't going to start springing fully formed from incubators or something like that. There will always be a long period of growth in which they are taking in a lot of knowledge.
Furthermore, parents in the US are going thrown to the wolves. There are studies and articles out there showing that American parents are incredibly stressed out in ways and to degrees you don't see in most developed countries.
If we want parents to do a better job with their kids, we need to design a supportive system that helps them raise their children. One of the consequences of our current model is that the societal message to parents is that authority is inherently abusive and cannot be trusted. This tends to poison their relationship to their children. If society were more of a "good steward" for the people, parents would have an easier time being good stewards to their kids.
If you don't put those pieces in place, adding aggressive measures to take kids from parents just deepens the problem.
Positing that parents are merely intentionally abusive for no real reason and there isn't a biological basis and then seeking to add more punishment to the system is broken on the face of it. A lot of abusive parents are trying to control a child and simply don't know how to get good results. A punishment model isn't very effective.
I was a homemaker and full-time mom for years. I am frequently pissed all over by career women who think what I did has no value. I have been told he people on Hacker News that college education is wasted on a mom and homemaker.
But the reality is that raising healthy people is a serious challenge and requires a lot of knowledge and skill, especially if there are any special needs, including a high IQ. Very smart children are endlessly curious and "curiosity killed the cat." Patents of gifted kids are often tearing their hair out.
And we aren't providing them the support they need. Then we wonder why so many people are dysfunctional.
Also, with the psychosocial explanations, there is an element of blaming someone or something else. Most people will feel they are the victim of something unjust and that resonates with many people.
Mental illness typically has both components. Family is known to compound mental health issues that have a biological component.
My sister minored in psychology in college and took some graduate courses in it later. She once told me "We must not have the genes for schizophrenia or someone in the family would surely have it given how the family operates" and then talked about how schizophrenics go do inpatient therapy, get better, go home to the nutso family and get worse again.
I think we need better parenting resources for families dealing with neurodivergent offspring. I've seen time and again that parents don't know effective means for dealing with such kids and it actively creates problems which then become very intractable.
I'm good at that and did some work for a time with a related organization and spent a few years trying to figure out how to blog about such subjects. That never really got traction. Articles like this give me a twinge of regret and guilt that I never figured out how to more effectively share what I know. I'm convinced that better parenting resources for difficult kids would really make a difference in the world.
But, I just don't have a path forward. You need fertile ground for such seeds to take root and I've never found that, basically. Then I got badly burned by someone who used information in my parenting blog to manipulate me and it's a case of... Whatever. Not my problem.