More Kids Are Getting Anti-Psychotic Drugs

Yahoo News ^ | Fri Mar 17, 9:16 | LINDSEY TANNER

[cougar_mccxxi]

CHICAGO - Soaring numbers of American children are being prescribed anti-psychotic drugs — in many cases, for attention deficit disorder or other behavioral problems for which these medications have not been proven to work, a study found.

The annual number of children prescribed anti-psychotic drugs jumped fivefold between 1995 and 2002, to an estimated 2.5 million, the study said. That is an increase from 8.6 out of every 1,000 children in the mid-1990s to nearly 40 out of 1,000.

But more than half of the prescriptions were for attention deficit and other non-psychotic conditions, the researchers said.

[cougar_mccxxi]

This is a tragedy one step below abortion in my eyes.

[SoftballMominVA]

I had a student once on Risperdal--when a new doctor took him off it was a rough 6 weeks getting that out of his system. He would fly into rages and I had to get the other kids out of the room FAST. Hpppened several times a week for about a month. Once he got cleaned out, he was the sweetest kid you would ever want to meet.

Wish I knew why doctors prescribed this stuff to young teens. Seems the cure is worse than anything else.

[Doomonyou]

It's better than giving them psychotic drugs.

[SoftballMominVA]

hpppened==happened--fingers type too fast for my brain :)

[Galveston Grl]

They did not mention that most of these "misbehaving children" are boys.

[TBP]

If you can't get the mothers to kill them, then put them on psychotropic drugs to damage their ability to resist the control of the anti-human Marxists.

[thoughtomator]

It's long past time to make giving mind-altering drugs to a child illegal, too many parents and teachers have them prescribed to make up for adult failures.

[Elsiejay]

Quite so; the report declined to state the boy:girl ratio of drugged children. It seems quite common that boys are given drugs to cure them of being boys.

[PalestrinaGal0317]

This reminds me of a boy I worked with in an after-school program a couple of years ago. He would usually be somewhat hyper, but he figured out pretty quickly that when I said "sit down and do your work" he wasn't going to get much in the way of warning again before he'd be getting consequences for the behavior. Ergo, he'd sit down, be quiet, do his work and then go play. We got along fine pretty much all the time. One day I came in and he was behaving atrociously; not just bouncing off the walls but being mean to other kids, etc. I told him (very sternly) to sit down immediately . He said he couldn't. I asked why. His response? (This at the age of seven, mind you): "My teacher forgot to have the nurse give me my pill so I can't be good." My response was that that was nonsense and that while it might be a little harder for him to control himself he was certainly going to or he'd lose privileges really quickly. He behaved perfectly well for the rest of the afternoon.

[jamaly]

Bump for later

[SouthernFreebird]

You can't have drug addicted people giving birth to babies developed in a drug haze and not expect to see problems with the upcoming generation.

[jdhljc169]

bump

[silverleaf]

Risperdal has been a Godsend to my child.

It seems your experience was with a child whose undelying reason for rages was improperly diagnosed.

[silverleaf]

It's only a "tragedy" if the child hasn't been properly diagnosed.

I suspect there are a lot more tragedies among kids who are NOT diagnosed and who do NOT receive appropriate medication.

[silverleaf]

At what age do you think a human being starts to exhibit signs of organic brain dysfunction? You would make it illegal to treat until adulthood?

[thoughtomator]

The vast majority being subject to this treatment don't need any treatment at all except to be treated like the perfectly normal kids they are.

[MD_Willington_1976]

Brave New World....

[Cobra64]

I grew up in private schools all my life. The teachers never took any BS from the students. Foe example, one kid gave some back-talk to one of the teachers who subsequently picked up the kid and bounced him off the wall.