Shanker – mental health

Now we have this huge and constantly growing body of research tying for example at one o’clock, internalizing disorders: so problems, you know, anxiety disorder, depression, mood disorder, tying this into significant challenges in self-regulation. It’s the same with, the next wheel, externalizing disorders, these are, you know, conduct disorders, aggression, bullying, and now we’re seeing this as somehow fundamentally tied to problems in self-regulation. This is absolutely critical, imperative for the revolution that’s occurring in how we understand, reframe children’s behavior, because if it’s a problem in self-regulation that lies at the heart, for example, of a child with a conduct disorder, it means that what’s happening-that child is a challenge in the first level that we talked about when we looked at the levels of self-regulation namely their arousal regulation, their autonomic nervous system, it’s not a problem that their inhibitory muscle is too weak that this needs to be disciplined, this needs to be strengthened through punishment and reward, no, no, it’s because the child’s nervous system is under, it’s been drained too much- too many stressors. And what’s happening is the child does not have enough capacity, enough resources to deal with further stressors and that’s what triggers the impulse, that it represents what I believe is a truly profound revolution in how we try to, if not prevent, at least dramatically mitigate these kinds of problems that we see at two and three o’clock, these problems of mood disorder, these problems of behavior. We’re not going for management, instead we’re going to try to understand the challenges on the child and then reduce them.  

So the next two wheels you’re still in the realm of classic abnormal psych so we’re looking now at risky behaviors, so the child’s vulnerability as they grow older as they’re an adolescent to things like gambling, drugs, and here again we have a growing body of literature saying that what we should be looking at with these children is their self-regulation, what we should be trying to do is trying to figure out is the child chronically in an alastatic load condition, is the child chronically hypo or hyper-aroused, and if the child is than rather than trying to target the specific risky behavior that concerns us like, you know,  alcohol or whatever, we want to figure out why is the child in this load condition, how can we reduce it, and thereby naturally see the inclination for the risky behavior naturally dissipate.