Léon Denis stated, in the preface to the great work: In the invisible, that Spiritism will either be scientific, or it will not subsist. The greatness of Denis' thinking is shown in some noble Spiritist scholars who manage to associate the scientific content with the Spiritist in the same ideal.

Dr. Tais Silveira Moriyama, from a third generation of a Spiritist family living in the state of Sao Paulo, a doctor in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and director of the Bairral Institute of Psychiatry, in Itapira, SP, does this with remarkable clarity.

We selected excerpts from her interviews, held at the Spiritist Community Cairbar Schutel, SP, in 2018, and in the electronic magazine oconsolador.com, on 09/10/17, in addition to a lecture given in Matao, also in 2018, and other exhibitions given by her in Spiritist and academic environments.

The simplicity of the language is associated with an original, beautiful and coherent way of saying things. In our view, this is what Spiritists should know about mental disorders in childhood.

Early signs of a possible problem

The main indication that the child needs to undergo socio-emotional assessment is the failure to achieve development goals typical of age. This can be very subtle. For example, a child who is slow to speak may be in a pattern of development, but may also have some disorder. Another example: a schoolchild who cannot make friends may be just a shy child, but, alternatively, may be a social phobic or have low social skills. Another example: an 8-year-old child who cannot sleep away from his parents, may be suffering from separation anxiety.

Reincarnatory factors

I believe that all of our current sufferings have some connection with the past, whether recent or remote: the journey of the Spirit is more relevant than the journey of the body in determining psychiatric symptoms. Children are already born with some trends that increase or decrease the chances of developing mental disorders, but life events can potentiate or dispel these trends. In other words, in short, children are born with some trends, but it is up to the parents to ensure that these trends are well redirected.

Drugs and current factors

It is also true that some children and adolescents will develop mental disorders after using drugs and traumatic life events. In the case of schizophrenia, for example, we know that the main triggering factors of the condition are the use of marijuana and exposure to violence or situations of isolation and social disrepute. Today we have strong evidence data that show us that bullying, family conflicts and other adverse life events are risk factors for the development of several mental disorders, such as depression, anxiety and even psychosis.

Family

Children who grow up in violent environments and who suffer or witness intra-family conflicts have higher rates of depression, anxiety, substance use, psychosis, among other disorders. The problem, however, has deep roots. Dysfunctional families are sometimes genetically ill families, whose members have small imbalances that, taken together, generate great difficulties in relationships. It is true that each member of a family has an obligation to seek their own balance and contribute to a healthy home environment, however, when this is not possible, care should be taken to spare children from witnessing or participating in conflicts. The way a child perceives his family environment can determine how he will perceive his environment for the rest of his life.

Parental responsibility

When we see a child behaving less than expected, the most common reasoning that people do is this: this boy behaves badly because his parents did not give him an education. This thinking is too simplistic to be true. We see children with very different types of behavior with very different parents.

Biology

Today we know that everything that involves behavior has a physical element, because the Spirit to manifest itself on Earth needs the body.

The Spirit manifests itself among us through matter and matter influences the Spirit. It must be kept in mind that it is increasingly difficult to separate physical from psychological factors. Today it is quite clear that life experiences leave biological marks on the brain. For example, children who are cared for with zeal and affection may undergo changes in the processes of gene transcription; with this they start to produce more substances related to positive affections which makes them less prone to depression and anxiety. From the Spiritist point of view, we can understand that the experiences of the Spirit leave registers in the body.

Anxious mothers tend to “pass on” anxiety to their children because they teach them the anxiety model and because they “pass” anxiety-related genes to them through material inheritance. But we can “change” the genetic inheritance, offering the child a different environment. Through affectionate care we can prevent anxiety-related genes from being activated.

Every human behavior has a component that is born with the person (spiritual and biological) and a component that comes from the life history of the interaction with the environment.

Relationships

Psychic suffering is closely linked to our ability to coexist with other individuals and to know how to deal with the stress that comes from these relationships. The human being is an extremely social species. Therefore, I would say that in general the factors that have the greatest influence on a child's socio-emotional development are the other human beings that surround him.

Autism

For each case there must be a divine purpose. I believe that in the case of our little geniuses, we can stand before Spirits on a mission on Earth who ask to be born with social faculties stunned in order to dedicate themselves more fluently to science, technology, music and other arts. The social brain costs the Spirit very dearly, it brings a series of instincts that take from us part of the originality and inclines us to imitation, to copy other individuals and to care for belonging to groups above all. In some other cases of autism, we may be facing the reincarnation of a Spirit that was too focused on his intellectual progress, letting his affective and emotional faculties atrophy. In other cases, I believe that autism is a state of suffering imposed on the Spirit to rescue certain crimes of the past.

Sense of life

I believe that it is essential to awaken the existential sense of children, leading them to become attached to ideals that can fill their lives with meaning. And we must also be concerned with not promoting more facilities than necessary; I really believe that we need to face as selfishness the exaggerated support we give for the comfort given to our children, when there is still so much need around us. Providing excess facilities is an indirect way of teaching selfishness and insensitivity to the needs of others. They need to learn to give as much as they need to receive.

Evolution of social understanding of childhood

Historically, the zeal that we have with the child varies depending on the importance that the child has for the adult. Industrial development was accompanied by a complete abandonment of childhood, which was not seen in rural society, nor in hunter gatherers. Why that? Because children in industrial society are not needed as a workforce.

This changes in postmodern society. Today's families are absolutely “child-centered”, in a way that gets to be bizarre. A typical family commits most of its income to children and adults are often neglected for the child to receive more than the socio-cultural condition of the family allows.

And what is happening to this generation? They are failing to maintain themselves at the same socioeconomic level that their parents provided them with. The generation that is now 20 years old (Peter-pan generation) is having enormous difficulty in entering the job market, as young people have salary pretensions far above what the market offers. Overprotection in childhood has meant that young people do not understand that it is necessary to make efforts to achieve things in life. Excessive comfort causes more frustration than deprivation.

Example

We have to be better role models too, because children learn much more through imitation than through words; in short, we need to be more balanced if we want to have more balanced children. And it is also necessary to remember to take our little ones to the exercise of spirituality; we need to allow them to have clear guidelines from childhood and to know the teachings of love and compassion.

Alcohol and drug experimentation in adolescence

Adolescence is a stage of transition between a condition of almost absolute dependence (childhood) to a state of autonomy (adult). The teenager is above all an individual discovering ways to have autonomy. It is up to the adult to allow this in a context of the lowest possible risk. It is up to the adolescent to seek interaction with another social group (among the higher primates, adolescents are expelled from the pack by the alpha male and, to survive, they need to join another pack. 40 to 60% of them fail to do so and die). It is natural that at this stage the adolescent feels a little strange with the family, without the same connection as childhood, and this reinforces their need to seek other relationships outside the family. (Continued in the next edition.)