Where Do You Want the Killing Done? An Exploration of Hatred of Children

Many times have we heard the tropes: Children are our future; children are our most important resource; investing in our children is our highest social priority. These platitudes have clear implications for individuals, families, and public policy. Every child should receive adequate food and health care. Teachers and child care professionals should be trained and valued.

We know well our failures to achieve these and other implications of our beliefs. Child psychoanalysts are particularly knowledgeable about the dismal landscape of contemporary childhood mental health. Children's mental health services receive diminishing public and private resources. More fundamentally, our society is accepting a damaging, degrading, and dehumanizing mythology about children's mental health. Children are often seen as collections of symptoms and diagnoses rather than as human beings responding to their environment and inner experience, trying to cope and make sense of their world.

The pharmacological and health insurance industries promote a distorting fictionalization of children that supports the preferential use of medications and advances their economic interests. Their efforts have been effective. Current estimates of the range of American children receiving psychiatric medications annually range between 9% and 12%, compared with 2.5% in 1987 and 6.2% in 1996 (New York Times, January 14, 2003). “Antipsychotic medications were prescribed to 1.4% of children and adolescents in 2002, compared with .28% per 100,000 in 1995” (New York Times, June 6, 2006). In 2005, one study found that 1.6 million children and teenagers—280,000 of them under age 10—were given at least two psychiatric drugs in combination, with more than 500,000 receiving at least three psychiatric drugs and more than 160,000 receiving at least four medications simultaneously (New York Times, November 23, 2006).