1/4 of CA foster kids on psychotropic Rx drugs
invite response
2014 Aug 24, 8:24pm 1,404 views 3 comments
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curious2
2014 Aug 25, 5:49am
Their children, ages 9, 10 and 13, have been diagnosed with various behavioral disorders, and the drugs are aimed at treating them, though May doesn’t like the idea of putting the kids on drugs. She would prefer more emphasis on therapies dealing with attachment disorders.
“You have these young brains not fully developed, and you’re giving them these drugs they may or may not need,†she said. “It’s horrible to put kids on drugs because of money.â€"
Shaman
2014 Aug 25, 6:16am
When they closed the asylums in the 90s, they reopened as the entire nation on psychiatric drugs. Woo! Medicate for life!
What gets me are the thousands of little kids diagnosed with "bipolar" disorder, when the very definition of the disorder precludes presentation in children. But hey, gotta have a diagnosis to begin "treatment!"
I saw an ad the other day for a legal firm that would fight for money if you'd taken a particular ADHD drug as a boy and developed breasts as a result. Awesome!
curious2
2014 Aug 25, 6:47am
Woo! Medicate for life!
"Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug, and more than half take two...." With federal policies maximizing Rx prices, patients become a captive constituency for legislation to shift their artificially inflated costs onto others. Both major parties play the same shell game, pretending to "protect" everyone with federal enforcement and mandates, maximizing their own power and revenue.
"With alarming frequency, foster and health care providers are turning to a risky but convenient remedy to control the behavior of thousands of troubled kids: numbing them with psychiatric drugs that are untested on and often not approved for children.
An investigation by this newspaper found that nearly 1 out of every 4 adolescents in California’s foster care system is receiving these drugs — 3 times the rate for all adolescents nationwide. Over the last decade, almost 15 percent of the state’s foster children of all ages were prescribed the medications, known as psychotropics, part of a national treatment trend that is only beginning to receive broad scrutiny.
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“To be prescribing these medications so extensively and so, I think, thoughtlessly, with so little evidence supporting their use, it’s just malpractice,†said George Stewart, a Berkeley child psychiatrist who has treated the neediest foster children in the Bay Area for the past four decades.
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In the short term, psychotropics can calm volatile moods and make aggressive children more docile.
But there is substantial evidence of many of the drugs’ dramatic side effects: rapid-onset obesity, diabetes and a lethargy so profound that foster kids describe dozing through school and much of their young lives. Long-term effects, particularly on children, have received little study, but for some psychotropics there is evidence of persistent tics, increased risk of suicide, even brain shrinkage."