Cries Unheard: A New Look at Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Cries Unheard provides an opportunity for a new look at the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder debate. We seek to redress some basic misconceptions regarding the current interpretation of children's problem behaviours. We argue that, while a range of children's behavioural characteristics may be viewed as "symptoms" earning the child the diagnostic label of ADHD, such symptoms are not sufficient by themselves to diagnose children as ill, much less to justify medicating them.

Often, a failure to make a "holistic" assessment of a child within a family context, as well as within his or her wider school and social settings, may result in a misdiagnosis of behaviour as illness.

In Cries Unheard we address issues such as:

* how changing social and economic parameters have led to an increase in the diagnosis of ADHD in children;

* how parents are pressured to seek the medication of their children in order to ease problems of classroom management;

* the link between a decline in the provision of services for children and an increase in their medication;

* they myth that infants do not remember painful and traumatic experiences; and

* the impact that a mother's depression can have on her infant.

This book is written in support of the rights of the child and as such it is a book about the rights of us all. In particular we support the rights of our children to be given appropriate medical assessment and treatment and not merely to be medicated into conformity by an increasingly time pressed and stressed medical profession and education system.

Gil Anaf graduated in Medicine from the University of Adelaide in 1975. He spent three years in general practise prior to undertaking further studies in London and obtained a specialist degree in Psychiatry in 1988. Dr Anaf worked as a private psychiatrist while pursuing a long-standing interest in Psychoanalysis. He became an Associate of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society in 1995.

In response to federal budgetary measures specifically aimed at reducing the availability of psychoanalytic treatment and long term psychiatric treatment, Dr Anaf and a group of like-minded psychiatrists formed the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists (NAPP) in 1996. Its aim has been to independently advocate for psychiatric practise and the reinstatement of lost services, increasingly under threat by policy makers intent on introducing rationing in the name of managerialist agendas.

Dr Anaf is the founding President of NAPP. He works in full-time private practise as a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst, and also a Clinical Lecturer for the Dept Psychiatry at the Adelaide University.

Peter Ellingsen is a senior writer with The Age newspaper in Melbourne. For 10 years he was a foreign correspondent for The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The London Financial Times. He has won numerous awards, including the Australian Journalist of the Year Award, the Walkley Award and Quill Award. In2001 he won the Public Health Association of Australia Print Award for a series on depression, "Tangled Up in Blue".

Following a break from journalism, during which he completed a Masters of Science degree in psychology at London University, he has written and researched in the field on mental health. He has a particular interest in psychoanalysis and language, and is currently undertaking a PhD in the department of Psychological Medicine at Monash University.

George Halasz MMBS, B Med Sc, MRCPsych, FRANZCP is in private practise as a child and adolescent psychiatrist and honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine, at Monash Medical Centre. Since 1992 he has been a member of the Editorial Board of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry and book review editor (1992-1998). He is coeditor of She Won’t Be Right, Mate! The impact of managed care on Australian psychiatry and the Australian community (1997) and She Still Won’t be Right, Mate! Will managerialism destroy values based medicine? Your health care at risk (1999). He has a special interest in the transmission of trauma between the generations, most recently contributing to Children of the Shadows. Voices of the Second Generation edited by Kathy Grinblat (University of Western Australia, 2002).

Anne Manne is a writer and social commentator who has written widely on feminism, motherhood, childcare, family policy, fertility and related issues. Her articles on these topics have appeared in The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Australian. Her longer essays have appeared in Quadrant Magazine and The Australian’s Review of Books. Her article on fertility and family policy "Women’s Preferences, Fertility and Family Policy: The Case for Diversity", Journal People and Place. Anne Manne has been a regular columnist with The Australian and is presently a columnist and feature writer for The Age. Prior to writing full time she taught in the Politics Departments of Melbourne and LaTrobe Universities. Her forthcoming controversial issues surrounding feminism and motherhood, the debate over early institutional childcare, the problems of reconciling work and family life, the crisis of fertility, the impact of the new globalising capitalism on the changing landscape of childhood, and proposes different, new policy directions for family policy.

Frances Thomson Salo trained as an adult and child psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society. She works in private practise and is a Senior Lecturer in the University of Melbourne Masters of Infant Mental Health.