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I t would take a deliberate act of will to ignore the crisis in child development we are currently confronting. For example, it was recently reported that in Canada the number of prescriptions for stimulants in treatment of attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder, or ADHD, has increased by 43 per cent in the past five years. In the U.S., where over three million children are receiving such medications, ten per cent of children are now said to meet the diagnostic criteria for the disorder. Also in the U.S., fifty-one percent of boys and 49 percent of girls aged 13-19 now have a mood, behavior, anxiety or substance use disorder, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. It need hardly be pointed out that the diagnoses of other of childhood developmental disorders are also burgeoning - autism has seen a twenty or thirty-fold increase in the past several decades. Such exponential rates in childhood problems cannot be explained inside the usual medical model of genetic disease, since genes do not - and cannot - change in population over a short period of time. Nor can they be ascribed to more proficient or more active diagnostic efforts. What we are witnessing is no less than the destruction of childhood - that is, the rapid erosion of the conditions that healthy child development requires.
Contrary to the genetic fundamentalism that pervades medical thinking and public awareness these days, genes by themselves cannot possibly account for the complex psychological characteristics, behaviors, or health or illness of human beings. Genes are codes for the synthesis of the proteins that give a particular cell its characteristic structure and functions. They are, as it were, alive and dynamic architectural and mechanical plans. Whether the plan becomes realized depends on far more than the gene itself. Genes exist and function in the context of living organisms. The activities of cells are defined not simply by the genes in their nuclei, but by the needs of the entire organism - and by the interaction of that organism with the environment in which it must survive. Genes are turned on or off by the environment, as shown by the new science of epigenetics.
Mainstream medicine continues to separate the mind from the body - if not in theory, then in practice. According to this mind/body split conditions are caused either by external factors, such as toxins and microorganisms, or by inherited propensities transmitted genetically. But neuroscience now tells us, incontrovertibly, that the human brain develops in interaction with the environment, including and most especially, with the emotional/psychological environment and it remains in interaction with the environment for a lifetime - a process the UCLA psychiatrist and researcher Daniel Segal has called interpersonal neurobiology.
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The necessary condition for the healthy brain development of children, including the development of circuits that govern mood, emotions and behavior, is the presence of attuned, non-stressed, consistently available parental caregivers: a condition less and less available owing to multiple stresses in our society, social and economic factors that burden parents, destroy communities, disperse families and cause general insecurity. It is no accident that in 2008 in Windsor, Ontario - an auto making town across the river from Detroit - the number of childhood visits for mental health disorders increased by nearly fifty per cent. The parents are stressed - children get medicated. The brain physiology of the child is affected by the emotional states of the parents.
Nor is the impact of parental mind states limited to a child’s brain: it has been shown in a number of studies that the children of stressed parents are far more likely to have asthma. Surprising? Only if we ignore the mind / body unity. It is no coincidence that we treat asthma is with the direct analogues of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline.
Nor, if we understand the mind / body unity, are we astonished by recent studies showing that children who are abused have a nearly fifty per cent increase in the risk of adult cancer, or that that the children of divorce face a doubled risk of stroke in late adulthood.
For the commonest afflictions of North Americans - heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes - we do not need to seek strong genetic origins. The causes are apparent enough. It has been reported, for example, that among the Cree people of northwestern Ontario diabetes is found at a rate five times the Canadian national average, despite the traditionally low incidence of diabetes among First Nations populations. The genetic makeup of the Cree people cannot have changed in a few generations. The destruction of the Crees’ traditionally physically active ways of life by what we are pleased to call civilization and economic progress, the introduction of high-calorie diets, and greatly increased stress levels are responsible for the alarming rise in diabetes rates.
Appreciating the mind/body unity - amply demonstrated by science - is the only way to make sense of what we are seeing with children today, and it continues to be the only way to understand adult disease. Since the publication of my books on attention deficit disorder - Scattered Minds: A New Look At The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder (or Scattered in the U.S.); on the mind / body unity, When The Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (in the U.S. subtitled Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection); and on addiction, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction - new data have only confirmed that the source of illness, mental or physical, is to be sought not in narrowly physical causes or in our DNA, but in our lives. That is, in our culture, in our society, and above all in our relationships with one another - and, on the deepest level, with ourselves. One recent study, for example, showed that in children genetically predisposed to addiction, the genes are not expressed - no addiction happens - if the child is brought up in a nurturing environment. On the other hand, as many other studies have shown, childhood adversity exponentially increases the risk of physical and mental illness of all kinds, as of addiction.
My work for the past two years has largely consisted of traveling across North America and speaking on these issues of childhood development, the stressed parenting environment, the core importance of recognizing that mind and body function as one unit, and the clinical and healing implications of such knowledge. I find that audiences across the continent are thirsty and hungry for this information. People recognize intuitively that, for all the dramatic achievements of modern medicine, the mainstream explanations are narrow and leave us powerless to face the physical and mental health challenges that currently beset us.
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