The Help that Helps

By: Carol Maxym, Ph.D.

After four inquiries from prospective clients last week, each of whom had a long story of turmoil where the help hadn’t helped, I thought it time to address the issue of what really does help kids and families.  I get that that sounds arrogant; I really do.  Still when one hears of kids or young adults who are hospitalized again and again with little to no amelioration of their symptoms,  diagnosed with made-up disorders, prescribed medications for which the data supporting their efficacy is mainly MIA, it seems to me that the obvious next step is to remember the second most common finding in research regarding what works in psychotherapy.  

That finding?  

What hasn’t worked up till now won’t start working by doing more of the same. 

Simple.  Obvious.  Generally ignored. 

I do not take suicide or suicidal thoughts lightly.  Ever.  However, redefining hopelessness as depression or even the more ominous Clinical Depression and prescribing medications (whose side effects absolutely include suicidality and/or suicidal ideation) doesn’t seem to be very sensible.

The help that helps is very likely to be sensible.

When kids are hopeless, it is the reasons for those feelings which are important and require help, guidance, love, direction, understanding, boundaries, and hope from adults.  When kids are feeling “weird” (to quote Graham Moore who won an Academy Award on Sunday), it is the context of their lives which screams for scrutiny. 

Kids who can’t/don’t find meaning in life and who cannot or just aren’t seduced by lots and lots of  expensive designer stuff and  facebook friends they’ve never met, aren’t disordered.  They aren’t sick.  They aren’t anomalies.  Adolescence is a time of seeking, questioning, wondering, exploring.  When all that is pathologized, we leave kids in a worse place than before.  Holden Caulfield jumps to my mind.  And Young Werther.  David Copperfield (Dickens)…Oh, and Hamlet.  This is not a new problem; only our ways of helping kids to move through the problem is new—and apparently not that much better.

“Life is not as easy as walking through a field” (Pasternak) and yet we keep on walking.

The help that helps is very much based in understanding people—kids, young adults, and adults as well.  By understanding I mean accepting the human condition and that life isn’t a long series of smiley faces.  Understanding is connecting, empathizing, noticing context—and holding to moral and ethical standards.  Understanding is about meaning, the lifelong endeavor to find meaning.  The help that helps is about talking to the person in front of you with no thoughts at all about a “diagnosis.” 

In all the 500+ pages of the latest DSM, there is nothing about feeling weird or hopeless or wondering what is the meaning of life or this child’s life at this moment and beyond.

The help that helps must look beyond the prevailing template [paradigm] which has morphed and degraded the human experience into something that is as often as not a mischaracterized as a “disorder.”