1. Children's brains are still developing. Psychiatric drugs prescribed for DSM-5 diagnoses are not going to help brain development, and the long term effects of these drugs on a child's developing brain are not fully understood.
2. DSM diagnoses medicalize developmental issues of childhood.
3. The DSM works with the mistaken assumption that all children develop at the same rate.
4. Children are recklessly labeled with ADHD and medicated when they are simply younger or less mature than their classmates.
5. A child who has temper tantrums now may be be labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis and medicated with psychotropic medication. Calm and consistent discipline, not medication, is the best way to get rid of temper tantrums.
6. DSM diagnoses are silent about the underlying causes of a child's problems, which are most often reactions to situational stress in a child's life. In the worst case, a child who has suffered or is suffering trauma may be labeled with ADHD and receive medication to mute his symptoms, without the trauma ever being addressed.
7. Children are now being prescribed ever more powerful drugs for DSM diagnoses like ADHD when the more typical stimulant medications do not work. Some of these drugs, like antipsychotics, are prescribed "off label" for children. This means that the FDA has not approved these drugs for use with children, nor have the drugs been tested for safety with children.
That said, is the DSM-5 any more dangerous for children than the DSM-3 or the DSM-4? The answer is "yes" and "no." The reason the DSM-5 is worse is that drugging children with psychiatric medications has become the mainstream solution to treating their symptoms, so the effects of the new manual on our country's children is more dangerous. On the other hand, labeling children with psychiatric disorders has never been grounded in science in the 3rd and 4th editions of the DSM. The DSM-2 was less dangerous than the later editions because it recognized that childhood problems were most typically reactions to stressful environmental factors. The solution to a child's misbehavior or anxiety or depression was to find the underlying problem in the child's life, not merely to drug away the symptoms.
Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D. is the author of Pills are not for Preschoolers: A Drug-free Approach for Troubled Kids