Posted by This comes following a major report into south Kerry CAMHS last week, which revealed that a large number of children had been prescribed excessive and harmful medication.
Psychotherapist warns ‘doomsday’ news cycle is harming anxious adolescents – The Irish Catholic
The relentlessness of 24 hour news cycles has created a sense of panic among young people, psychotherapist and author of Fragile, Stella O’Malley has said.
Ms O’Malley said this has been particularly acute in the reportage of the climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, and more recently the Russian-Ukrainian crisis.
This comes following a major report into south Kerry CAMHS last week, which revealed that a large number of children had been prescribed excessive and harmful medication.
Ms O’Malley said that if you’ve got a child “who is anxious by nature, and that could be for lots of different reasons” and “inflict that child with an awful lot of doomsday scenarios”, it’s not good for them.
“I think we forget just how much it [the climate crisis] was in the news and what a big deal it was before Covid arrived,” Ms O’Malley said.
“Then Covid arrived and it took over the newspapers and we all collectively just put aside our climate crisis fears and we moved into Covid and it feels like it’s happening again now with this ‘world war three’ line.”
Ms O’Malley said it feels as though there’s a “collective hysteria” around news cycles, which is the result of a “if it bleeds, it leads” concept.
“There is a concept that the more alarmist it is, the more our brains are drawn towards it. It’s not good for us,” she said.
Diagnosing
Ms O’Malley said she believes rather than overmedicalising and overdiagnosing children, which is “creeping in” to Ireland from America, “I think what we’re looking for is sustainable, long-term improvements in these children’s lives, who are very vulnerable and very distressed”.
“I think the families need more support to enact the kind of behaviour management that’s often recommended by people like myself: therapists. I think too often what might happen is the parents might bring the child somewhere and somebody might, like a doctor, and they might be offered a behavioural management programme, but it’s frankly too difficult to carry out,” she said.
“It’s very, very difficult, so they might say different things that the parents need to do and it’s incredibly difficult. It doesn’t properly get carried out, and as a result, the parents move along the road into medication because that’s the only option.
She said everybody would be “much better off” if the family were supported and helped so that they could carry out this behavioural management, which “might be with mentors or buddies or some sort of family support system where the child is regularly meeting somebody who’d help them carry out the behavioural management, so it’s not all up to the parents because it’s too hard”.