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Medical conditions should not be blamed or used as an excuse for children’s bad behaviour says Max Pemberton.
By Max Pemberton
Published: 7:00AM BST 12 Jul 2010
‘It’s not his fault, he’s got a disability,” said the mother as her son ran around the outpatient clinic causing mayhem. He had just upturned a table, sending magazines skidding across the floor. One of the receptionists began picking them up and looked at me, rolling her eyes.
“He’s got conduct disorder, you can’t blame him,” his mother continued as I ushered them into my room. While I was working in child psychiatry, I’d frequently see children such as this boy whom, to the casual observer, would be branded as “badly behaved”. But in medicine, extremes of such behaviour have in recent years attracted psychiatric diagnoses. They are now illnesses. Terms such as “school refusal disorder” and “oppositional defiant syndrome” (hostile and defiant behaviour to authority figures) are labels often given to children. But are these illnesses in the traditional sense? And, if so, what causes them?…Continue Reading
