On a recent debate about diagnosis and treatment options in children with emotional and behavioral disturbances it was found that children with problematic moods fail to receive the care.

The report takes a critical as well as a sympathetic look at long-running debates about how to interpret problematic moods and behaviors in children and about whether and how to intervene. It finds fundamental agreement that some children exhibit patently dysfunctional moods and behaviors and that these children deserve though too often do not get access to recommended care.
But the authors also describe inevitable disagreement about, for example, exactly where to draw the line between normal and unhealthy aggression or exactly how to balance the need for symptom relief and the need for schools and communities to accommodate a diverse range of children.
"What we've learned is that diagnoses don't have clear boundaries�what counts as healthy and unhealthy anxiety or healthy and unhealthy aggression, for example, is not written in nature," said Parens. "Human beings living and working in particular places and times define them. This leads to inevitable disagreements about whether a cluster of moods and behaviors is best understood as disordered, about how exactly to describe some symptoms, and about whether or which particular diagnosis is warranted."
"One of our conclusions is that because diagnosis and treatment decisions invariably involve value commitments, there will be disagreements, especially on the margins and in difficult cases," said Johnston. "How one weighs, for instance, the parental obligations both to shape children and to let them unfold in their own ways can influence how one responds to difficult diagnostic and treatment decisions."
The report also concludes that too little is done to improve children's environments that contribute to their problematic behaviors.
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The project was designed to better understand the controversies surrounding the diagnosis of mental disorders in children in the United States, and recent increases in the use of medications to treat those disorders.
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The workshops, held over the course of three years, brought together clinicians, researchers, scholars, and advocates from a variety of backgrounds with widely diverse views. The first and last workshops considered the controversies generally, while each of the middle three workshops looked at them in the context of one diagnosis attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression, or bipolar disorder.
Source-Eurekalert