Posted on 03/17/2006 3:43:13 PM PST by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Kids don't need drugs. They need two parents, they need to not be in day care, they need their parents to turn off the TV or better yet, throw it away. They need to play outside and have plenty of fresh air and exercise, and they need to eat regular meals made out of real food without chemicals and crap in it.
Do this and 99% of the problems will either go away or be manageable.
Oh yes, and out of public schools.
Well geez, that was the point of the whole article I thought. Good point.
Then you are suggesting the "vast majority" of children have incompetent pediatricians who have prescribed improperly.
Or have done so under pressure from parents, teachers, and a thriving litigation industry.
Yes, and some of these drugs also stunt growth. I've seen the results. Doctors are being irresponsible. They are just throwing crap at a problem and hope some of it sticks.
Yes, stunted growth can be a side effect, but this cna be managed. Untreated ADHD is far more dysfunctional to a child's life.
Risperdal by the way, has as a side effect an increase in appetite, which can help maintain growth, as it is doing for my child. Not medically the reason why he is taking the combination of ADHD med and risperdal, but a good effect.
i think they need to be doing more research and better research on this issue.
it sounds like clinical practice is jumping ahead of the research.
but there are more psychotic kids out there than any of us would like to believe.
what is your opinion based on?
was your child diagnosed with anything else, in addition to the adhd? (e.g., bipolar disorder, conduct disorder, or some sort of acute psychotic disorder)?
No, but one underlying cause of his ADHD is suspected FAS (fetal alchol syndrome), which means he has brain damage in the area of his brain that affects executive level thinking.
The neuropsychologist who tested him suggested teaming his ADHD medication (adderall) with risperdal to improve his mood and better organize his thinking. He is only 8, but the future prognosis suggests FAS/FAE kids are great risk for developing depression, conduct disorder among other problems. Probably because many of them do not have informed medical, social, emotional and educational support for their behaviors. So we are working with every cutting edge suggestion to beat the odds and dodge a future bullet.
It did give me pause to realize that risperdal is recognized for treatment of psychosis and bipolarity. But it has had a very very good effect for my son (he takes a tiny dose. My regular pediatrician admitted she had not heard of treating FAS/ADHD kids with risperdal, all her patients taking it were bi polar. I have networked with parents of 3 yr olds who have been diagnosed as bi-polar.
I suppose the psychiatric community did not use to think they could diagnose some of these disorders, including ADHD (or the precursors to them) in very young pediatric patients. The fact that research has improved to the point that they can diagnose (and treat rather quickly and effectively) also suggests a reason more pediatric patients are using ADHD and/or anti-psychotic medication.
Personally I blame environmental toxins that affect our fetuses, and the myriad of mercury-based injections that every child must now take...for some portion of young kids with behavior problems, even to the epidemic of autism. My poor kid had a birth mother who drank, he was starved before birth and after, he was lead exposed, he was institutionalized from birth to age 5...he had every risk factor in the book. But you would only see him now as a very bright, charming, creative, artistically talented, talkative and verbally precocious kid who loves to be part of a team.
For my son, risperdal alone has no effect on his severe hyperactivity. Adderall alone helped him control his impulsivity and to focus, but left him irritable and emotionally volatile when it wore off.
So the combination has been good for us and I am so glad we went the neuropsychologist testing route for diagnosis and management. My child now processes his thoughts a LOT more logically, his mood is stable, and his ability to focus has "unlocked" him (in the words of his teachers)
This article about kids being prescibed "anti psychotic medication" is so much hoo-haa. Many drugs have been developed for one disorder, and then found to have a good effect in treating other disorders.
Hypothetically, if risperdal helped prevent breast cancer, non-psychotic women would be lined up to take it and the MSM headlines would say "Doctors Prescribe Increasing Use of Anti-Psychotic Medication to Female Patients"
....and the usual suspect freepers would be shocked....... shocked I tell ya.
A childhood full of psychotherapy rather than a childhood with a father. I bet they would have doped me up bigtime had this stuff been popular then. I knew it was a waste of time, the therapists knew I was totally normal, but it made my absent parents feel better... so the therapists got their Corvettes and I got an intense interest in the effect of parentlessness on children.
My mom is hopelessly addicted to them. I am very close to being anti-drug. There has to be a better way. Try fish oil. Try anything.
thank you for the info---it does sound like environmental lead and alcohol might be major factors.
i'm glad the combined meds are working.
best of luck to you and your son--he is lucky he ended up with you as a parent!
i agree with you that some kids (maybe a lot of kids) who are put on meds probably should not be--but whether the majority should or shouldn't be is another matter.
having 2 parents probably protects a lot of kids from horrible fates. and insurance companies would rather have people on meds than in therapy, because it costs less.
also, if you go back to the days before everyone needed a college education to get a job, it didn't matter if kids dropped out of school because of short attention spans--they could still get jobs and function in the world.
but, for any individual child, once they get to the point where they can't function in school, the question is what do you do? you can't turn the economy back to 1800, you can't necessarily undo all the damage that has been done in each instance, you can't get the parents back together, and you may not be able to undo the physical harm done by environmental toxins (or genetics).
each individual child has to be evaluated individually, and then something (therapy, diet, meds, or whatever) has to be done.
I wonder why that happened. I'm taking Risperdal now, and when I don't take it I don't have anger management issues.
i hope things have worked out well for you.
He was misdiagnosed, badly. He was given it to handle OCD and it backfired
kids shouldn't be put on any drugs unless it's necessary. if behavior problems can be handled without drugs, it's usually better to do it that way. a lot of drugs have unwanted side effects, at least in some people. however, some kids will need medications.
the diagnosis of ADD has been replaced by ADHD--it's a terminological change, not a change in an actual diagnosis in an individual. (it had other names prior to ADD.)
however, it is not always easy to distinguish ADHD from bipolar disorder (or other disorders), so changes in diagnosis are often made. diagnosis in psychiatry is not easy. psychiatrists do their best, but a lot of disorders have overlapping symptoms, and the "same" disorder may also show up with very different symptoms.
(i'm not a psychiatrist, i'm not an MD, and i can't prescribe drugs, by the way.)
Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I'm in a coma:
Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;
Love's as good as soma.
"O Brave New World that has such people in it!"
They have, thank you, due to my own self-motivation to make something of myself better than that which my circumstances would dictate, and despite the attempts of so-called professionals to make me a perpetual whiny dependent. Of course, if they had drugs in their arsenal back then, and not just propaganda and misplaced confidence in their abilities, they may have won, and I might instead be a drooling couch-potato government teat-sucker somewheres.
Make no mistake - millions of kids are on Ritalin and similar drugs because the drugs make them complacent and docile, not because it corrects any supposed problem they have. Maybe a fraction of a percent actually do have some problem, but overall it is far better that that fraction go untreated than to turn millions of perfectly healthy children into zombies.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.