Insel of NIMH Misses the Mark: Medication as Social Control

Tom Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH,) in his recent blog post Are Children Overmedicated? seems to suggest that perhaps more psychiatric medication is in order. Comparing mental illness in children to food allergies, he dismisses the "usual" explanations given for the increase prescribing of medication.  In his view these explanations are; blaming psychiatrists who are too busy to provide therapy, parents who are too busy to provide a stable home environment, drug companies for marketing their products, and schools for lack of recess.  Concluding that perhaps the explanation for increase in prescribing of psychiatric medication to children is a greater number of children with serious psychiatric illness,  he shows a lack of recognition of the complexity of the situation. 

When a recent New York Times article, that Insel makes reference to, reported on the rise in prescribing of psychiatric medication for toddlers diagnosed with ADHD, with a disproportionate number coming from families of poverty, one clinician remarked that if this is an attempt to medicate social and economic issues, then we have a huge problem. He was on to something.

In conversations with pediatricians (the main prescribers of these medications) and child psychiatrists on the front lines, I find many in a reactive stance. When people feel overwhelmed, they go in to survival mode, with their immediate aim just to get through the day.  They find themselves prescribing medication because they have no other options.

From many I have heard some variation of this statement:  "In light of my inability to address the family dynamics and social-economic circumstances, all I have available is medications to help with the child’s symptoms. I see patients who come from unstable environments, where parents are themselves stressed and overwhelmed. I recognized that a child's “difficult,” “impulsive,” “oppositional” behavior is most often a communication about family, social, and economic stressors that are making a child's family less competent at caring for him. However, I lack the resources or the tools to do anything about these overwhelming issues. I hate that feeling of impotence.  So I use the only tool I have, medication. When I can bear to think about it, I recognized that medication is just shutting off the child's efforts to tell me something – in effect silencing his voice- and that I have become a force for social control."

When that child is in a school setting, with a high student-teacher ratio, perhaps also with teachers who have little experience working with kids from stressed family backgrounds who are struggling with emotional regulation, the pressure to control the child’s behavior increases significantly. It is not simply that schools have reduced unstructured time (though this is a problem as well.) Medication again becomes an agent of social control. Rather than devote the resources to address the underlying issues, we can use the medication, so effective in the short term, to silence the children.

Insel also does not address contemporary research demonstrating the developmental and relational nature of emotional and behavioral problems in children, well known within the discipline of infant mental health. Referring to "biomarkers" he seems to have an idea that one day we may be able to test for mental illness in children with a blood test or a brain scan.   The importance of safe, secure primary caregiving relationships in healthy emotional development is supported by an abundance of research in neuroscience, genetics, and developmental psychology, One cannot treat emotional and behavioral problems in children by treating only the child.

As knowledge about early childhood mental health makes its way in to mainstream health care, there have been calls for universal screening. But if we are using medication as an agent of social control, we need to be very careful not to put the cart before the horse. 

If we do not first have a health care system, and an education system, that has time and space to listen, to support parents, to appreciate the complex interplay of biological vulnerability and environmental stress, to understand the meaning of a child's behavior, what may happen is that the huge numbers of children who screen positive will have no meaningful, relationship-based treatment available (and the medication/talk therapy dichotomy is another oversimplification- there are multiple evidence-based interventions that support parent-child relationships.)  This together with universal preschool has the potential, unless there is significant change, to result in massive numbers of young children silenced by psychiatric medication.

I wonder if Dr. Insel is himself feeling overwhelmed. Perhaps he realizes that the increase in children with emotional and behavioral challenges, as well as medicating of these children, is a symptom of an enormous social problem. That problem is our society's undervaluing of children and parents, our failure to devote resources to support healthy growth and development, described by Elizabeth Young Breuhl as childism, or prejudice against children. He has good reason to feel overwhelmed with this realization, as it makes his task as director of the NIMH exponentially larger. 

Misuse of ADHD label as symptom of a broken health care system

When the American Academy of Pediatrics came out with new guidelines a couple of years ago extending the age of diagnosis of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) down to age 4, it seemed as if Pfizer might have been waiting in the wings.  Soon after, a new preparation of ADHD medication in an oral suspension, for kids too young to swallow pills, became available.

I was a lone voice expressing opposition to this change in the guidelines. As a primary care pediatrician I saw up close how the diagnosis was made based on symptoms alone, missing complex underlying problems. As the standard of care is to treat what we call "ADHD" with medication and/or "behavior management" these problems, which can include a history of abuse and neglect, family substance abuse, ongoing marital and family conflict, and history of significant loss, are not addressed. As the standard of care is also to see these kids every three months for brief follow up, these issues can go unaddressed for many years, as the focus of care becomes adjustment of dose and preparation of medication.

The reason this happens is not because these primary care clinicians are unaware of these underlying problems. It is because the burden of care for children with the constellation of the symptoms of dysregulation of attention, behavior, and emotion, that we now call ADHD, falls almost exclusively on their shoulders.

The economic reality of primary care practice, due in large part to the administrative costs of managing a huge array of different health care plans, is that clinicians are under pressure to see more and more patients in less and less time. Add to that the severe shortage of quality mental health care services, and the primary care clinician is really stuck.  The appeal, both for parent and clinician, of a drug that can be very effective in controlling the symptoms of an out-of-control 4-year-old, is understandable.

Whenever I write about this subject, I get a barrage of comments from parents saying things like, "but my child really has ADHD."  Therefore, I want to state clearly that I am referring to a public health problem, not to one specific child. In fact, if the system were not broken, I would not need to be writing all these blog posts about the misuse of the ADHD label. Children who are struggling in the ways I have described would be able to get the care they need.

If a broken health care system is the problem (a problem that extends beyond my level of expertise), what can we do for these symptomatic 4-year-olds?

Here is where a model of preventive mental health care comes in. When a child is symptomatic at 4, it is very likely that the roots of the problem were present at three, two or even in infancy. Recently, after I gave  Dewald lecture at the St Louis Psychoanalytic Institute on this proposed model, I had the opportunity to have breakfast with a group of infant mental health colleagues. We spoke about what we termed "the nice lady (or man) down the hall" model.

A primary care practice would incorporate in to their team a mental health clinician trained to work with young children and parents together. The primary care clinician would have easy access to this clinician, who would work in collaboration with the primary care team. Ideally there would also be  a team of such early childhood mental health specialists, including an occupational therapist.

When children are young, and their brains are rapidly growing, a brief intervention, such as several hour-long visit over a several month period, can go a long way towards placing that child and family on a different developmental path.  It makes sense, both clinical and economic sense, to invest the greatest resources in care for this age group. By the time the child is in school, the problems have become more complex and entrenched.

There has been a lot of work lately on screening for mental health concerns in the 0-5 age population. It is imperative that we develop adequate model of treatment before screening is put in place. If such treatment is not in place first, large scale screening will likely insure that the folks at Pfizer who developed this new liquid form of ADHD medication will do very well.

Gym as treatment for ADHD?

An article in the current issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry about the role of exercise in treatment of ADHD gives me hope that there is some movement in the direction of non-pharmacological treatment of problems of regulation of emotion, behavior, and attention. ( I do not use the term "ADHD" for as readers of my blog know, I believe that ADHD as defined by DSM is an oversimplified, artificial construct.)

However, the accompanying editorial entitled "Gym for the Attention Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder Brain?" gives me concern that this idea represents yet another oversimplification. The editorial calls for "empiric support" from "well- designed studies." Our culture has a love of "evidence-based medicine."  I hope that before embarking on these studies, there is consideration given to what a colleague referred to as "medicine-based evidence," or research based on what we have learned from both clinical experience as well as other disciplines.

Primarily what we have learned is that its not just "exercise" or "gym," but a very specific use of the body to help the brain with the task of self-regulation. In fact, for a child who is overwhelmed by sensory input and easily dysregulated, as many of the children carrying the "ADHD" label are, traditional "gym" may be a disorganizing experience.  I described this concept in detail in a previous post, Emotional Regulation in Children: Using the Body to Help the Brain. It preceded my Boston.com blog so I have re-posted it below:

I recently heard a great story from a parent in my behavioral pediatrics practice. Their son was very active and had a hard time settling down to learn, and so, before an early morning tutoring session, a very resourceful teacher suggested he ride a scooter down the empty halls to the room where a group of kids with reading difficulties met. To make it fair, the teacher allowed all of the students in the group to ride scooters to class. The kids lay on their stomachs and used their arms to propel them down the long hall. Interestingly, not only this boy, but also all of the kids in the class began to do better!

One of the best weekends of the Infant-Parent Mental Health Post-Graduate Certificate Program that I have been attending and writing about over the past year, was with child psychiatrist Bruce Perry. He spoke of the importance of what he referred to as "rapid alternating movements' in achieving emotional regulation. Dr. Perry's ideas grew out of his frustration with the traditional model of psychiatric care, where children who have experienced significant trauma are expected to sit and talk with a therapist about their experience( and of course are also medicated.) His model of intervention is based on knowledge of brain development and is termed the "Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics.'

While it is not my intention to describe the model in detail, one of the main messages, which has relevance not only to traumatized children, is that in order to think, learn and process experience, one must first feel calm. A range of activities can achieve this calm. Dr. Perry does therapy sessions with very troubled children while going on walks. Horseback riding, martial arts, drumming and dance are other activities that can serve to achieve this kind of calm. A group of fellows from the program got to try out the theory. After a long, very stimulating (and also somewhat dysregulating) day of learning with Dr. Perry, we went ice-skating. Not only was it a lot of fun, but it worked wonders in helping us to process the experience.

Often when kids are struggling in school, teachers express concern that they are "over-scheduled." But if extracurricular activities are carefully planned and well thought out, they can be considered an essential part of treatment. It is best to have some kind of a calming activity interspersed with homework, tutoring or therapy. These can be tailored to a child's particular talents and interests. Many know the story that Michael Phelps struggled terribly with ADHD. Swimming can be a very regulating activity, but some kids with learning and behavior problems also have sensory processing difficulties and can't stand to have their head under water. Clearly swimming isn't the right choice for them.

The more children I see with a range of "behavior problems," the more I recognize the importance of using the body to help the brain. Occupational therapy for young children can accomplish this goal. But as children get older, and can learn to express their feelings, parents can help them identify what works for them. This same boy on the scooter, several years later, learned to recognize that when he was feeling overwhelmed, going down to the basement to play his drums helped him to regroup. This kind of awareness, both of mind and body, can serve kids well not only in childhood, but over the course of a lifetime as they learn to adapt to their particular vulnerabilities.

Central to this notion of using the body to help the brain is that movement take place in relationships. We know that children develop the capacity for emotional regulation in the context of relationships. Things like martial arts, horseback riding and swimming involve intimate relationships with teammates, coaches and instructors.

So I hope that before psychiatrists head down the road in search of "evidence" that "gym" is good for ADHD, there is sufficient thought and attention to what kind of physical activity, how and when it occurs, and if it occurs in the context of meaningful relationships.

The doctor as drug

Psychoanalyst Michael Balint said: “If you ask questions, you get answers, nothing else.” In his work with primary care doctors in post World War II London, where many patients had symptoms related to complex psychological trauma, he supported efforts to use the “doctor as drug,” encouraging these physicians to be fully present to listen to their patients rather than asking questions guided by a need to make a diagnosis.

I thought about this idea of the "doctor as drug" when reading two recent articles in the New York Times on the same day. The first, A Dry Pipeline For Psychiatric Drugs, bemoaned the lack of development of new psychiatric drugs. 

This is news that I would cheer for, if only our system of health care allowed for doctors to use themselves as the drug. What is needed is value of time and space for listening. In such an environment the doctor, (or I should say clinician, as today the caregiver is often someone other than an MD) can let the story emerge rather than being guided by a need to make a diagnosis, which is now more often than not followed by prescribing of psychiatric medication. 

For example, a recent study identified an alarming rise in prescribing of atypical antipsychotics to young children. 

Data from the inspector general's five-state probe indicate that 482 children 3 and under were prescribed antipsychotics during the period in question, including 107 children 2 and under. Six were under a year old, including one listed as a month old. The records don't indicate the diagnoses involved.

The very availability of such powerful drugs, that can quickly suppress symptoms, may actually act in direct opposition to careful listening and meaningful change.

The second article , A Powerful Tool in the Doctor's Toolkit, addresses the issue of placebo effect. It refers to the work of Dr. Ted Kaptchuk, director of the center for placebo studies at Harvard:

Dr. Kaptchuk thinks of placebo effects as just one of the many things in the toolkit of medicine. It would never be a substitute for appropriate medical care, but it is something that can enhance medical care greatly. Wise doctors and nurses already do this. They’ve found, usually just by personal experience, that their “everything else” — respect, attention, comfort, empathy, touch — often does the lion’s share of medical care, no deception required. Sometimes the prescription is just the afterthought.

Under the influence of Big Pharma and the health insurance industry this issue has gotten turned on its head. The pill has become known as the treatment, and the relationship- the respectful, careful listening- has become the "everything else." Balint and Kaptchuk wisely recognize that it is actually the other way around.

Rebuilding Spinning Babies - gulp - as a business

Where fear is seen as compentency