Schools are in danger of slapping mental health labels on youngsters whose problems lie elsewhere.
Looking back over the many years I have spent as a clinician in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, I have lost count of the number of times that children or young people have been brought into the system by parents or professionals, including school staff, desperate to discover “what is wrong” with the child.
Because the young people present with significant emotional or behavioural disturbance, the adults around them are often convinced that there must be some underlying pathology that needs to be unearthed, or a missing piece to the puzzle which if they could only discover, would enable the young person to be “sorted out” by a mental health professional.
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