Scholarship

Schools are meeting rising student distress with patchwork solutions: crisis protocols, discipline policy, social-emotional curricula, referrals to services that may never materialize. Each is defensible alone. Together they rarely amount to a strategy.

DIMER argues that what those students share is not a diagnosis but a mechanism. Emotional dysregulation operates transdiagnostically, and a school organized around the mechanism rather than the category can intervene earlier and more equitably. Four pathways, forty-five appendices of working apparatus, and an unusual candor about where the evidence is thin.

The brother or sister of a child in crisis reads the household’s weather, absorbs attention that goes elsewhere, and develops difficulties no one names. Built entirely from primary sources, every figure checked against the printed page, and plain about where the literature contradicts itself.

Dedicated to the children in the corridor.