Posted on 04/22/2009 11:37:45 AM PDT by Wolfie
7-year-old boy prescribed powerful drug before suicide
Troubled boy was being treated by a Broward psychiatrist who is on a list of Florida doctors red-flagged as having ''problematic'' prescribing practices
MARGATE - Weeks before his death, Gabriel Myers, the 7-year-old Broward boy who hanged himself in the shower of his foster home, had been prescribed a powerful mind-altering drug linked by federal regulators to an increased risk of suicide in children.
In all, Gabriel had been prescribed four psychiatric drugs, two or three of which he was taking at the time of his death, said Jack Moss, Broward chief of the state Department of Children & Families.
Moss said he is not sure which medications the boy was taking because Margate police took the foster home's medication log as part of an investigation into Gabriel's death last week.
Three of the psychotropic drugs carry U.S. Food and Drug Administration ''black box'' label warnings for children's safety, the strongest advisory the federal agency issues.
Three of the medications are not approved for use with young children, though they are widely prescribed to youngsters ''off label'' -- meaning doctors can prescribe the drug even if not formally approved for that use.
(Excerpt) Read more at sun-sentinel.com ...
WHY are there so many MORE “brain damaged” kids today then all the years up through the middle 1960’s?
Yes, I meant to respond to your second point. If he was doing well in the Uncle’s care as the Uncle says, why wasn’t he still with the Uncle. Sad, sad case.
I can’t imagine a 7 yr. old having the idea of hanging himself with a shower hose. I hope someone looks at the 19 yr. old who he was having an “argument” with directly prior to his demise. This whole situation sounds fishy.
The thought of a 7 yr old being on so many meds makes me heartsick. Who in the world advocates for these kids once they’re in the maw of the State?
Maranatha Lord Jesus.
Mrs. AV
pot, lsd, other drugs, hair dyes, valium, birth control pills, other hormones, artificial sweeteners, and foods became ever more loaded with chemical “preservatives”
trace elements of some chemicals and other byproducts build up in the fatty and other tissues of your body - I believe this can affect the reproductive process an other processes (ergo, so many many women getting breast cancer these days)
When you conceive a baby, the human brain is a tough but sensitive organ- a tiny chemical interaction on even a one-2 day window of fetal development, can have a devastating effect. Women stop drinking smoking and using hair dye when they know they're pregnant- sometimes 2-3 weeks or more after conceiving. Others may just have little chemical byproduct time bombs in their body tissues, that affect the baby.
My child (adopted) has a brain pickled and pitted (my description) due to his birth mother's drinking, it manifests as severe hyperactivity and deficits in self-regulatory behavior - an inability to willfully control himself.
No you cannot beat or otherwise punish or even sometimes "discipline" someone with brain chemistry disorder into submission, only into hatred of you and themselves. If they are lucky they might develop emotional health and patterned behaviors that help their own brain to normalize. If not, ADHD meds are wonder drugs.
This poor little 7 yr old had inability to control his rage-if he was abandoned and raped - no wonder. Lexapro and Vyvanse couldn't take away all that hurt and anger and inattention and mistrust of casual people trying to control him. All those bio relatives and he was in foster care...
Why that child was not in intensive psychotherapy.... question to be answered.
Foster children have a notoriously bad success rate.
I think only something like 14% manage to graduate from high school. Many suffer from mental illness, and severe learning deficits, due to neglect, drug related pregnancy complications, or physical abuse. My wife grew up in foster care and she does a lot of work with foster care. Even the ones that survive, have many problems to work through.
This boy didn’t really get much of a chance at life. He probably experience as much trauma in seven years as most people experience in a lifetime.
Big pharma. Do you watch TV or read magazines? Do you see those ads from big pharma entreating you to ask your doctor to prescribe a certain drug to you that may or may not cure a disease that you may or may not have? By the way, have you ever listened to a motormouth spokesperson for big pharma describe the side effects of such drugs on TV or flipped many magazine pages in a print drug ad which detail all the horrible side effects of these drugs, which in the majority of cases sounds a lot worse than the disease itself. Have you ever noticed your newspaper or news channel pushing stories about new physical or mental problems, or new medical studies (reported by people like Dr. Sanjay Gupta perhaps?) and then, Voila!, a few weeks later, new stories about new and improved drugs that can ameliorate these afflictions. That’s big pharma and that’s how new “diseases” and afflictions become new diseases and afflictions .
This is so horrible. I am so against children being given ANY psychoactive meds. They aren’t very good for anyone else, either.
Lack of exercise.
I've become totally convinced that that is the number one reason that kids act up. They don't get a chance to burn it out of them.
Parental discipline is a very close second.
I know I'll probably hear about it for not putting discipline first, but after watching my kids and how they behaved when they were on the swim team and when the season was over, I'd say the activity was more critical to their behavior than my discipline.
When they got enough exercise, discipline was not an issue. It took way less to control them because they didn't act up as much. It was a much more pleasant atmosphere around the house.
There is no *edit post* feature on FR, so don’t bother looking for it. What you just did is the best you can do; ping yourself with the correction.
“good grief. I’m having a hard time understanding how a 7 year old could even grasp the concept of suicide. :( I can only imagine what those 7 short years held for him.”
sadly - the events leading to placement in foster care - or even what may have happened while in foster care probably made him a less-than-typical 7 year old.
It is frightening what poor little kids deal with these days.
thanks :) ...though I’m trying not to ping myself so much these days....what with it being the end times and all :)
http://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/news/20090126/adhd-drugs-hallucinations-not-uncommon
Interesting link here. I just saw an ad in a magazine for some ADHD medicine and the warnings that came with it were unreal. There’s no way I’d put ANY kind on that stuff with those kinds of warnings.
Too many people just don’t want to go to the trouble of investigating other causes of the behavior issues.
Aside from the exercise needs that kids have and the discipline issues, food reactions are another factor that very few people consider to be valid and look into. My son was sensitive to artificial vanilla flavor. I was real careful about what I fed my kids. They didn’t get a lot of preprocessed snacks so it was fairly easy to figure out. Whenever he had certain kinds of vanilla ice cream, graham crackers, or Nilla wafers, he would almost literally bounce off the walls for a couple hours, til he was red in the face and his hair was wet with sweat.
If I had not noticed what was causing his behavior because of the careful way we ate, I doubt we would ever have figured it out. It would have been very frustrating trying to control a kid who had no control over how he was acting because of a chemical reaction of some kind in his body.
If we had not homeschooled, I have no doubt either, that they would have insisted that he be on these drugs.
As it was, I kept him away from the artificial vanilla and put him on a swim team and 90% of the behavior issues were settled. His whole childhood was not spent fighting with me.
This poor kid in this article certainly had more issues than the drugs. Being in foster care no doubt played quiet a role in this.
I was born in 1942 and recall as a kid in the late 40’s and into the 1950’s coming home from school, dumping what books I had, changing into my “play clothes” and running out the door to meet my friends. The rules were to be home for dinner by 5:45. No one worried about having adult supervision, making sure kids were properly dressed to avoid injury etc. We were left to our own devices and just had a good time. We played street football, or softball in season, went to the school yard and chose up sides for a game of ball or paired up and played stick ball. No supervision was there or necessary. Any arguments were settled among us and despite an occasional fight no one was ever hurt except for a bloody nose.
In the Summer especially we lived to get to the school yard. It seemed there were tons kids every day and the game(s) went on from about 9am right through the last visages of daylight. After dinner we were told to “be back home when the street lights came on” Parents never worried about their kids back then. It seems as if parents believed kids would behave because they were taught HOW to behave and the consequences of not doing what was right.
I worshipped my father and was scared to death of him at the same time. The most fearsome words that could be spoken to me by my mom when I misbehaved were “wait until your father comes home” I lived in total dread of this meeting and the resulting paddling I would get (sometimes). I seldom if ever made the same mistake twice thereby tossing the idea that fear doesn’t work as a teaching tool.
Today “wait until your father comes home” has been replaced with “come here and take your medicine and calm down” and “the school called and told me you talked back to a teacher today and got detention. Your grounded for a week so you can think about your mistake” has been replaced with, “don’t worry honey, will call the lawyer and straighten this out. You have the right to say whatever you want”.
What a shame.
Thank you for the reply.
If what you say about smoking, hair dye, etc is true regarding the effects on the new born, how do you explain the fact all this was done by mothers to be since forever yet the problems seemingly began with the children born in the late 1960’s?
I was born somewhat later but sure can identify with your childhood.
You’ve posed the $50K question. The answer is out there somewhere. Indeed, there is something going on.
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