I have nothing against pharmaceutical drugs. Anyone who has taken an anti-anxiety pill will tell you that they work beautifully for what they were intended to do. The problem is that we rely on these drugs as a stand-alone treatment instead of part of a comprehensive plan for the emotionally distressed person. After a lifetime of pondering my own problems as well as those of other similarly afflicted personalities, I have come to the conclusion that mental illness is not a genetic problem at all, but rather an emotional imbalance stemming from a lack of nurturing parenting and/ or growing up in a disconnected society. In other words, it is environmental, and it is related to stress.
Children are our canaries in the coalmine, i.e. they mirror for us the imbalances in the family unit and in the structure of society. When we don’t like their behaviour we label it a “disorder”, and we treat it with drugs. But what if we looked at it from a more holistic point of view and tried to understand and learn from it. By correcting imbalances in this way we could avoid drugging our children with psychotropic substances, with unknown long-term effects, in exchange for doing the work of unearthing the causes of emotional distress in our young people. In this way we would be working toward correcting a massive social problem instead of attacking the symptoms of it.
