Difficult isnt a mental illness

Heard about this 11 year long study in Canada on NPR today on a show discussing the reasons for ballooning rates of children diagnosed with a mental illness. The guest put it succinctly when he said that the best predictor of whether a child will be diagnosed with mental illness is his birth date. Younger kids have more behavior issues that older kids and get labeled more often than their older peers. Ugh. The lack of actual science, let alone common sense, in child psychology today is sickening and it leads to dumb shit like this. But I've always felt psychologists had as much medical credibility as chiropractors. We dont understand the brain and far too often adults label age appropraite behavior as abberant psychosis rather than seeking out the cause of those behaviors, which often are entirely rational reactions to bad teaching/parenting/environments that most adults would echo just in an adult way. As adults we can choose to walk out of boring useless lectures or other people being jerks -but kids are usually stuck and the younger they are the less likely they have the emotional/social tools to deal with situations in socially acceptable ways.  

Lazy parents, bad teachers and arrogant doctors are medicating kids based on maturity levels - how compliant they are, rather than actual brain electrochemical science. These kids were just being kids, boys being boys, but with a label and some drugs altering the development of their brain they may really develop the neorochemical abnormalities they didnt have before. And of course we can trust government and big pharma to do complete studies on the adverse lifetime effects of randomly nuking a growing brain...right?