It is funny when we watch Desperate Housewives where the kid need psychiatrist help. Then there are other sitcoms where kids have their own shrinks. Those are supposed to be funny and not real.
However, it is not so funny when in reality, there are kids who need antidepressant. It is shocking that at such a young age, the children are finding it hard to cope with life. Whatever happened to the joyful, carefree, innocent, playful childhood which children are supposed to experience?
In the Western countries, they have this problems. Read the below from WebMD :
Jan. 1, 2009 — Medication helps depressed kids, but only those whose symptoms are severe enough to warrant treatment with antidepressants, analysis of clinical trial data suggests.
The study is a careful analysis of data from 12 published and unpublished clinical trials in which newer antidepressant drugs were studied in children aged 6 to 18 with major depression.
There was a big problem with these studies: A placebo — fake pills — helped nearly half of depressed kids get better. Antidepressant drugs did only a little better, resulting in substantial improvement for 59% of kids vs. 48% for placebo.
Does this mean the drugs don’t work very well? Or is something else going on? That’s what Jeffrey A. Bridge, PhD, of Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and colleagues tried to find out.
In my opinions, some of those kids who were helped by even placebos are merely needing some gentle help from loving families and people around them. Without sounding like a self-righteous Christian, I think all kids need are love, acceptance and lots of time from adults. These adults may not even be their parents but people who can give them the loving care.
I once read a book my Zig Ziglar where he said LOVE is spelt TIME. He said our time is translated into love for our kids. Parents who tried to come up with excuses like spending quality (but little) time with their kids (in their busy pursuits) are merely fooling themselves and hurting their kids.
I know many parents can get very defensive when people imply that they are not spending enough time with their children. In my parenting forum, full time working mothers will get sensitive when full time mothers talk about it. But the truth is, when our kids has ‘turn mental’, we got no one to blame but ourselves.
Parenting is one area where we greatly need faith to help us. We need to believe that there is the Almighty, hovering around us, helping us all the time. And we need to translate and transform that belief to our children, giving them the security that they always have God to help them to cope with peer pressures, body image, raging hormones, low self-esteem, society acceptance and a whole load of problems face by the children and youths. When they have God in their midst, I believe they do not need placebo or anti-depressant drugs anymore. But we live in a such a crazy world where some of us have made God redundant.
January 4th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Love your post. So true about what you said. I agree too to the statement LOVE=TIME:)