Does your child’s psychiatric diagnosis provide you with precise information about his lagging skills and unsolved problems? Not really. While diagnoses—such as ADHD, oppositional-defiant disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, autism spectrum disorder, reactive attachment disorder, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder—can be helpful in some ways (for example, they “validate” that there’s something different about your child, they might be necessary to qualify your child for special services, and they might be needed to convince your insurance carrier to pay for mental health services), they
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