reddutchgirl's Journal

I wanted to get back to this subject for a minute by telling ya'll a story.  This was back when I first got out of the army and attending college.  With my history of abuse I thought psychology would be a great field for me.  I taught a self esteem class at the local mental hospital for children.  I had a wide range of children from eight to 17 years of age.  My first day I bought them all journals and new pens and introduced myself.  Told them a little about me and I asked to hear about each of them.  Do you know that I had an eight year old boy smile sweetly, tell me his name and his "condition" BipolarII.  EIGHT? BIPOLARII?  I had recently taken the abnormal psy class and knew the criteria for this dx.  In no way shape or form could this child be given this dx.  The rest of the children do the same thing.  One very beautiful 14 year old told me she was narcissistic.  What teenager isn't?  It was quit unsettling and I had access to all of their files, so I went to digging.  Do you know the only reason most children was in this hospital was b/c of abuse by family members?!!!  Here's the part that made me mad: these children were given these dx's in order for the insurance co. to pay for the bill.  So they are wearing these labels for the rest of their life so that their stay is paid for.  These insurance co's have to have a dx in order to pay for the inhospitalization.  Great, but what they are creating is a large number of children who will uphold these dx's.  These kids are smart.  They had access to the library and most all of them carried around info about their so-called disorder.  These poor kids were dealt an unlucky deck and they have to struggle through life with a big a** label tattooed on their forehead.   Sorry, but this gets to me.  I soon decided that sociology was the route for me.