Screening for postpartum depression and borderline personality disorder: Food for thought

Abstract

Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 54(3) now collecting these labels, often in multiples. With them they collect medications and an identity that views themselves as fundamentally ‘disordered’. In child psychiatry, we need to find a way to keep the nuance of individual experience and the subtleties of understanding a child in context. This is an approach that keeps open possibilities for the future of each child, particularly those who are brought for help. My concern is that already campaigns of mental health literacy work to fix a child to their diagnostic identifications which become difficult to break free from. A childhood mental health literacy initiative can only serve to increase the diagnoses of childhood mental health disorders, while failing to consider the complexities of children in context. It is only an ‘illiteracy’ that allows a child, in conjunction with those they come into contact with, to find their own language to author their own lives.