At 18 months of age, Kyle Warren of Opelousas, La. was presented with antipsychotic drugs to help with temper tantrums he was having. By the time he was 3, reports the brand new York Times, Kyle had been diagnosed with autism, BPD, hyperactivity, and oppositional defiant disorder. The medicines he was prescribed turned the boy into “a drooling, sedated, overweight zombie,” says his mother. This has been happening often which explains why experts have gotten involved. The question is whether or not small children should be receiving antipsychotics at all.
Without assessment, antipsychotic prescriptions are doubled
Antipsychotic drugs are being used on more than 500,000 kids and adolescents, reports the Food and drug administration in a September 2009 study. It is believed that teenagers dealing with schizophrenia is the biggest part of that industry considering that is when the disease is supposedly manifest. Of course, that is wrong considering pharmaceutical companies now have “tens of thousands” of preschoolers as customers.
The Times cites a troubling Columbia University study that shows that the rate of antipsychotics prescribed for toddlers (privately insured, ages 2 to 5) doubled from 2000 to 2007. A proper mental health assessment as defined by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry was only done on 40 percent of the kids in the survey.
Forgetting antipsychotics for toddlers in America
There is a major concern that kids are getting antipsychotics too early in their lives. Dr. Mark Olfson thinks this is horrible. He is a professor of clinical psychology that works for a Lane University program that is designed to help families with little money that have mental health difficulties in their children.
“There are too many children getting on too many of these drugs too soon,” he told the Times.
Many doctors feel like these heave medications are being prescribed to children and infants way too often. Olfson is one of those doctors. Diagnosis of mental conditions in young kids is a highly inexact science, to put it mildly. This makes the FDA’s acceptance of certain AstraZeneca- and Bristol-Myers Squibb-branded antipsychotics for use on toddlers all the more disturbing, considering the wide range of disagreement within the clinical community as to whether brains at such an early stage of development should be exposed to such potent mind-altering products.
Thus, doctors can legally prescribe antipsychotics for toddlers for off-label use, despite a lack of safety research. Pharmaceutical companies are getting lots of profit off this.
No longer can it be said that
My peers and I care about this earth
It will be evident that
My generation is apathetic and lethargic
It is foolish to presume that
There is hope.
And all of this will come true unless we choose to reverse it.
-From “Lost Generation” by Jonathan Reed
Additional reading
NCBI
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20215922
NY Times
nytimes.com/2010/09/02/business/02kids.html?_r=1 and partner=rss and emc=rss and pagewanted=all
Bio Med Central
biomedcentral.com/1471-244X/9/80
Actupny
actupny.org/reports/durban-licensing.html
Generations lost
youtube.com/watch?v=MR4EWSbXLWA
Alternatives to toxic psychiatric drugs
youtube.com/watch?v=sBN2Zjz4W-
