    27

    an

    frequently blinded by this phenomenon.42

    One good example is the medical community's former refusal to

    acknowledge the existence of adolescent depression.  Frederick K.

    Goodwin, scientific director of the National Institute of Mental Health,

    explains that    the psychotherapeutic community only recognized the

    existence of severe depression in teenagers and children in the mid

    '70s.  Says Goodwin, "Until maybe 10 years ago, we believed that

    severe depression was solely an illness of adults.  Adolescents didn't

    develop 'real' depression--they just had 'adolescent adjustment

    problems,' so most psychiatrists didn't and still don't think to look for it

    in kids.  Now, however, we know that idea is dead wrong."43

    In the '50s or '60s, you may have had a fourteen year old who

    couldn't sleep, who'd stopped eating, who was spending a good deal

    of his or her time weeping, who may have been a good student--bright,

    cheerful and sociable--but now seemed cut off from other people.  If

    you'd taken that child to a psychiatrist or psychologist, the doctor

    would almost certainly have dismissed the symptoms as merely a

    phase.

    Meanwhile, in 1951, medical researchers developed a new drug

    (iproniazid) to treat tuberculosis.  When the substance produced

    strange side effects--making patients euphoric and unusually

    energetic--it was slated for the medical trash can.  Then, in 1957, a few

    psychiatrists discovered that iproniazid could be used to relieve

    depression in patients who hadn't responded to any other form of

    therapy.  But it wasn't until the '70s that the use of these miraculous

    new pills spread through the medical community.44

    When anti-depressants began to spill from the pharmaceutical

    factories, a phenomenon which hadn't existed in the minds of doctors

    emerged from the shadows of denial.  The physician was suddenly

    willing to see a set of symptoms which a few years earlier he had airily

    dismissed.  Today, the good doctor sagely pronounces the new

      d focus on what they can.41  The medical profession's eyes are

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