Dr. Stanley Goldstein - Author and Psychologist

An article in The Wall Street Journal ("We Are Turning Too Many People Into Medical Patients. The swift rise in in diagnoses for everything from autism to ADHD may be doing more harm than good./March 17, 2025) aroused these thoughts.
Long ignored ignorance about child psychological development and developmental psychopathology (a term coined long ago by my doctoral advisor) enables much faulty medical diagnosis, as is decried in the Wall Street Journal article. Several factors have contributed to this.
1. Anxiety can mimic just about every physical symptom: feelings of warmth or cold; feeling faint; headache; stomach pain, elevated blood pressure and check pain; even visual symptoms in an optic migraine. Distinguishing the true medical concern from symptoms of heightened anxiety requires training which the typical physician lacks.
2. Autism is vastly misdiagnosed with some children's autistic features vanishing after brief play psychotherapy.
3. ADHD, Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, though enabling a lucrative treatment industry, is perhaps the most unsophisticated notion in medical history. First diagnosed by a seventeenth-century English physician as "mental restlessness," it took root in early nineteen-hundreds America as Minimal Brain Dysfunction, of which a Harvard psychiatrist remarked that any doctor affixing this diagnosis must have a minimal brain dysfunction. Its symptoms are identical with anxiety and depression, which are present in nearly all medical and psychological difficulties and school difficulties too..
4. Another diagnostic error is affixing the diagnosis of Bi-Polar Disorder to children. It is difficult to speak calmly of the degree of this error since the Bi-Polar Disorder diagnosis requires a fixed, adult personality which youth lack by definition.
5. The treatment for these misdiagnoses is usually one or more of the psychotropic medications, long articles of their misuse having been recently published both in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. A rarely acknowledged reason for this is that today's psychiatry residents receive only ten-percent of the training in psychotherapy they received seventy-years ago, fostering the belief that the treatment of choice for any of life's ille is a drug.
Truly, ignorance abounds. Nuff said.