Childhood Disorders - Information and Facts

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As someone has rightly said, "Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body". If the same child has some problem, the whole world is just a topsy turvy. A child's difficulty will become just the initial point and the new chapter of parental worry and concern starts. There seems to be so much of confusion, since, you may not know what to do and where to ask for help for your child. You end up worrying so much since there is doubt about whether the things you are worrying about are really a worry or just another routine thing.

Reason behind Childhood Disorders

Almost all the psychological disorders in children have some part or reason attributed to physiological or genetic components.Similarly there are others which does not seem to have a valid reason or cause. Childhood disorders which are caused by physiological or biological reasons are detected earlier in life. There are still some problems which go undetected in childhood and appear only in adulthood. Research show that many child mental conditions are biologically derived which makes a child prone to disorders.

Some of the childhood disorders which have biological components as the cause are given below:

1. Mental retardation
2. Learning disorders
3. Communication skills disorders
4. Pervasive developmental disorders (such as autistic disorder)

Statistics about Disorders in Children and their impact

According to an estimate and calculations, there are about 12 million children suffering from mental illness only in USA at any given point of time. And another surprizing fact is that less than one in five actually receive treatment of any kind or type. This means we are talking about 8 in every 10 children sufffering without getting treatment (it may be possible that they may not even know, they are suffering from a mental disease, at the first place). On the contrary, almost 3 in every 4 children suffering from physical problems recieve treatment and respond t the treatment.

Causes of Mental Disorders and Conditions in Children

Brain damage is the primary reason behind the retardation and other mental diseases in children. The brain damage could be because of one or many of the following factors:

1. Heredity
2. Embryonic problems
3. Birth complications
4. Childhood medical conditions which can include infections, traumas or lead poisoning
5. Neglect and abuse
6. Other psychological disorders that involve Neurological Impairment

Afterpoints in the Childhood Disorders

1. Nearly 90% of children have one or the other type of fears at varied stages which is part of their regular development. Fear of monsters, strangers are very common. As the child grows, these feras automatically are gone. But in some cases, these fear dies not go on their own and affects the child's normal development and behaviour. These fears are called simple phobias and they sometimes go away or remain deep within never to surface again if not confronted with the situation involving the fear.
2. Most common type of psychiatric illnesses in children in USA is conduct disorders.

Consider the pressures and issues which the child today faces in daily life. They are all so different from what we have faced when we were children of their age. The acknowledgement and understanding of above mentioned childhood disorders will help smoothen the growing process of every child

Classification of psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents

Both DSM-IV and ICD-10 contain a scheme for classifying the psychiatric disorders of childhood. Disorders of adolescence are classified partly with this scheme, and partly with the categories used in adult psychiatry.

Seven main groups of childhood psychiatric disorders are generally recognized by clinicians and are supported by studies using multivariate analysis (Quay and Werry 1986). The terms used in this site for the seven groups are listed below, with some alternatives in parentheses:

• adjustment reactions;
• pervasive developmental disorders;
• specific developmental disorders;
• conduct (antisocial or externalizing) disorders;
• hyperkinetic (attention-deficit) disorders;
• emotional (neurotic or internalizing) disorders;
• symptomatic disorders.

Many child psychiatric disorders cannot be classified in a satisfactory way by allocating them to a single category. Therefore multiaxial systems have been proposed. ICD-10 has six axes:

• clinical psychiatric syndromes,
• specific delays in development,
• intellectual level,
• medical conditions,
• abnormal social situations, and
• level of adaptive functioning.

Childhood Psychiatric Disorders
Problems of pre-school children and their families	Specific developmental disorders Specific reading disorder Mathematics disorder (specific arithmetic disorder) Communication disorders Motor skills disorder
Pervasive developmental disorders	Childhood autism Rett's disorder Overactive disorder with mental retardation and stereotyped movements Childhood disintegrative disorder Asperger's syndrome Atypical autism and pervasive developmental disorder
Hyperkinetic disorder
Conduct disorders	Truancy
(Juvenile delinquency)
Anxiety disorders	Separation anxiety disorder Phobic anxiety disorder Social anxiety disorder of childhood Sibling rivalry disorder Post-traumatic stress disorder Obsessive-compulsive disorders
Somatoform disorders and other unexplained physical symptoms	Conversion disorders Mood Disorder
Other childhood psychiatric disorders	Functional enuresis Faecal soiling Elective mutism Stammering Dementia Schizophrenia
Gender identity disorders	Effeminacy in boys Tomboyishness in girls
Child abuse	Physical abuse (non-accidental injury) Emotional abuse Child neglect Non-organic failure to thrive and deprivation dwarfism Sexual abuse
Other Condition	Tic disorders Suicide and deliberate self-harm Factitious disorder by proxy