A Review by Amy Tuteur, M.D., of a Book by Judith Warner, We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.

In this review by Amy Tuteur, the reviewer’s purpose was to persuade the audience. The argument conclusion was "we have used the wrong measurements to determine whether childhood mental illness is real (the rise in diagnoses, the rise in medications, the profitability of the treatment), and therefore we have reached the wrong conclusions.” Tuteur wanted readers to start acknowledging the amount of children affected by mental illness. One premise in this review was that “childhood mental illness is not new; we just lacked the tools to recognize it and any effective medications to treat it.” This premise sets the audience up to become aware that children with mental illness have always been a part of our society, but we have not always had ways to diagnose every child. Another premise was that, “childhood mental illness has always existed; we just never saw it because of prejudice, labeling (‘mentally defective’), and institutionalization.” The writer uses the premise signal ‘because’ in this sentence and then clarifies why we have had a hard time acknowledging childhood mental illness. In addition, Tuteur notes that the author of the book is credible because she started with the opposite belief from what she ended up supporting. After Warner “talked with parents, psychiatrists, and read medical literature and data to come to a conclusion,” she realized that “childhood mental illness is not a fraud perpetuated on society by Big Pharma like many believe.” This is a solid premise.

One part of the argument that used valid deductive reasoning was that the reviewer stated how Warner came to write a book that is exactly the opposite of what she initially set out to do because she thought the numbers of children diagnosed were rising too quickly. In addition, reviewer Tuteur noted how author Judith Warner no longer saw these numbers as inaccurate after doing her in depth research. Lastly, the reviewer talked about how author Warner stated that we have used the wrong measurements in the past, and we now need to use the children as patients instead of perpetrating the belief that Big Pharma is misleading us. This was deductive reasoning because the writer was connecting all of her arguments together one after another making it easier to make inferences about