This book offers a warning that American children are receiving increased chemical treatment from psychiatrists and provides a primer on how to improve the emotional health of kids without drugs. "Maelstrom" is an apt metaphor for the inexorable deterioration many children experience inside the mental health system. Kids Caught in the Psychiatric Maelstrom: How Pathological Labels and "Therapeutic" Drugs Hurt Children and Families challenges current treatment practices and addresses the critically important issue of excessive prescribing of psychiatric medications to children. This encyclopedic work reveals "inside the system" information, emphasizing the theoretical divide at the root of the controversy over diagnosis and treatment. It explains how the 1990s, "decade of the brain" replaced talk therapy with biochemical treatments, leading to the hegemony of the pharmaceutical industry—and subsequently the massive drugging of children. Author Elizabeth E. Root details common diagnoses and treatments, explaining up-to-date brain research, with some surprising interpretations, and noting dangerous national precedents to mental screening. Finally, she illuminates pathways toward solutions and healthier families, sharing nonpsychiatric explanations for the nation's increase of troubled children and the rationale and research supporting non-drug, alternative approaches to childhood distress.