Title: Maelstrom Kids: A Moral Outrage
Abstract:
Suffer the children is our theme. What are the sources of suffering of American children? A historical perspective implicates the greedy psychopharmaceutical complex. But that culprit, it turns out, is just a sequela of the bigger and more pernicious one: our culture. How this is so will be revealed.
Anger transcends to helplessness and frustration as we ask what feels a futile question: What can we do? We are unwitting participants of exponential cataclysmic social change. We can’t turn back the clock or fix our economic crisis. Our children are the canaries suffering and dying in what has become a toxic culture.
The moral outrage is that our little canaries are scapegoated in the mainstream culture and exploited by the psychopharmaceutical complex. As long as parents persist in trusting the latter we have a conundrum. Labeling and medicating comprise “help” that is toxic.
Neuroscientists, educational psychologists, environmentalists, nutritionists and others provide seeds of hope. We therapists can help after all, but what’s required is a sea change of attitude and lots more education as we look to researchers from other disciplines for new methods to save our children. We can help parents help their kids. But the road to enlightenment demands hard work and dedication from us and from families. There is no easy fix.