ADHD, anxiety, depression—these are serious mental disorders that affect people everywhere, especially children. How to diagnose, treat and prevent these disorders in our kids is a heated topic with opinions all over the spectrum. Medication? No medication? Therapy? What kind of therapy? These are tough questions many parents find themselves asking in the face of a child who is depressed, anxious or suffering from ADHD.

I recently sat down with an expert on this topic–clinical social worker and psychoanalyst Erica Komisar. Erica specializes in counseling parents of children with mental disorders. Her book Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters is an excellent resource for all parents and talks about the importance of parent-child attachment in order to prevent mental disorders and mental illness.

In our conversation, I wanted to get to the bottom of this question: Are we over-diagnosing and overmedicating our kids? (Spoiler alert: we are.)

Erica says she estimates about one in five children today are medicated for mental disorders, but many of them shouldn’t be. That number is much higher than when I was in residency in the 1980s and the number seems to only be growing. Erica says there are a few…