Orland Evangelical Free Church | New York Times Readers and Parenting

Monday morning, two stories on the Times most e-mailed list pierced the privacy of families.

The first, published Monday, was “Identity Thief Often Found in Family Photo” by John Leland. The photo of a man and two kids accompanying the article has an arresting caption: “Eric Wagenhauser . . . found that his former wife had used his children’s Social Security numbers to apply for credit cards.” Leland probes the intimacies of such betrayals.

The second article, published Saturday (November 11^th), was “What’s Wrong With a Child? Psychiatrists Often Disagree” by Benedict Carey.

Carey portrays the frustrations of parents taking children on a tour of doctors and receiving a different diagnosis at each stop. The opening sentence: “Paul Williams, 13, has had almost as many psychiatric diagnoses as birthdays.”

The latest for Paul is bipolar disorder. “Basically,” says his mother Kasan, “they keep throwing things at us, and nothing is really sticking.” Paul has already been on “antidepressants like Prozac, antipsychotic drugs used to treat schizophrenia, sleeping pills and so-called mood stabilizers” in various combinations.

The methods of diagnosis, about which psychiatrists have “deep uncertainties”, are too subjective. “Psychiatrists have no blood tests or brain scans to diagnose mental disorders. They have to make judgments, based on interviews and checklists of symptoms.”

Carey reports, “A child’s problems are now routinely given two or more diagnoses at the same time, like attention deficit and bipolar disorders.” The frustration has pushed once-shameful topics into the open. “At the playground, in the gym, standing in line at the grocery store, parents swap horror stories about diagnoses, medications or special education classes. Their children are often as fluent in psychiatric jargon as their mothers and fathers are.”

Parents sometimes respond by becoming, shall we say, tactical – not putting confidence in the doctors but using their diagnoses all the same. Camille Evans’s son is thought to have a mild form of autism. She says, “Most important for me, the diagnosis gives him access to . . . speech therapy, occupational therapy and attention from a neurologist. And for now it seems to be moving him in the right direction.” Evelyn Chase’s 10-year-old son was diagnosed bipolar. She says, “I used the bipolar diagnosis for school and getting services, but I don’t think it covers his behaviors.”

Why are parents going to so many doctors? Because they cannot understand such phenomena as “impulsive, loud, abrasive” behavior, “difficulty sustaining attention, following instructions, listening, [and] organizing tasks”, extreme anger, and mania.

What sent Paul Williams into the psychiatric world in the fourth grade was “a screaming match with a school counselor”, after which he left the school and spent the night riding the F train through Brooklyn alone. His mother figured he needed help since this was his second disappearance.

The parents in this article seem helpless in all respects except one: they interact instinctively with the professional, bureaucratic culture they understand. But the article provides little other information about the parents that might add context to their children’s behavior: divorces, scenes of children and parents interacting, indications of parents’ philosophies about discipline.

For a further glimpse into that private world, Leland’s unrelated piece about identity theft is riveting.

Wagenhauser’s two children have not even entered junior high, yet their credit histories have been destroyed by their own mother. “She pleaded guilty to two counts of fraudulent use of a credit card this year and is now in a Texas prison.” A third child, 15, is embittered against Wagenhauser for her mother’s imprisonment. Wagenhauser’s second marriage has almost broken from the stress.

Half of identity theft victims who discover the perpetrators “say the thief was a family member, a friend, a neighbor or an in-home employee, according to surveys by the Federal Trade Commission and Javelin Strategy and Research, a private research firm.”

And identity theft is not just done by parents against children.

One couple found their son had obtained two credit cards using their identity, running up $22,000 in debts. They decided not to report him. They negotiated with him to assume his own debts and “resigned themselves” to help by paying $5,000.

The mother’s devastation comes through in her lengthy quotation. “We’d make an arrangement for him to pay us, but I’m sure he wouldn’t. He has a unique way of getting around anything. It doesn’t send a very good message, but putting him in jail is not going to help either.” She added, “I don’t know what went wrong [with him], but in the end we have to say it’s our fault.”

The boy’s father gives a powerful clue as to what happened. He gives it in a moment of bureaucratese in which he tells his son’s motivation for the crime. “The explanation was that we never helped him when he wanted the money.”

The explanation was. The good old white collar passive voice. That’s how he talks at the office.