Over medicating children: comments then an article by Philip Dawdy

 

If we don’t want to create millions more people disabled by pharmaceuticals, we need to stop diagnosing and drugging children’s trauma responses and behavioral problems as serious mental illness. There has been a massive surge of drugging children in the last couple of decades. Over medicating children is becoming standard in psycyhiatry.

It’s extremely troubling.

Recently there is a most tragic case which underscores the absurdity of this crisis. It is the story of Rebecca Riley who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 2. She died recently, poisoned by the deadly cocktail of psych meds the psychiatrist and parents gave her. This link brings you to the story of Rebecca and is also an analysis of the crisis in general.

But the more insidious nature of the problem is hundreds of thousands of kids who are put on meds chronically and slowly go down hill, leading to a life-time of meds and dysfunction. I just watched the movie that a reader sent me. I cried off and on throughout the whole thing. We are creating a nation of people who will go on to live lives like mine and much worse. Really I’ve had it very easy. I’ve been very lucky. So many people whose lives are ravaged by these drugs never escape what becomes permanent damage, disability and empty lives without relationships other than with the professionals who treat them. (the current tragic lives of so many of our “mentally ill”)

The movie concentrates on the phenomena of diagnosing 10% of our children with ADD and ADHD and then looks at anti-depressant use in adolescents.

Absolute horror stories.

Watch the movie if you have the time. It’s an hour and forty-three minutes. It does a good job of looking at these issues, but so much more can be said and the movie never absolutely refutes the existence of ADD and ADHD. At this point I am skeptical that there is any validity in diagnosing anyone with anything that can be considered a chemical imbalance of any kind. This is an exploration on my part, but biopsychiatry is quickly losing any credibility in my mind. There simply is no evidence of chemical imbalance. It is simply a theory and belief system held by the powerful psychiatric industry.

This site will further explore these issues at a later time.

I was pleased to see that the movie discussed the importance of nutrition and how it can completely relieve the behavioral problems and suffering of these children. We need to start feeding are children well, from the time they are born.

Addendum: I posted this yesterday–today there is an excellent post by Philip Dawdy on Furious Seasons where over medicating children is also addressed.  (I am publishing it below) 

 UPDATE 2026: A while back Philip Dawdy gave me permission to copy any of his articles in the archives which one can find on The Way Back Machine. Philip’s work helped shape me in the early days of the internet and blogging so I’m pleased to share some of his work as part of my archives

March 19, 2007

McManamy Talks Bipolar Child Paradigm  _ By Philip Dawdy

Somehow, I missed John McManamy’s blog post a couple of weeks back on early-onset bipolar disorder or juvenile bipolar disorder or whatever the hell we are going to end up calling it, aside from a failed a social experiment, when all is said in done. When I write “failed social experiment,” I refer to the reach of the bipolar child paradigm, which is being pushed on children as young as two-years-old, leading to them being given antipsychotics and, in some very tragic instances, injury (yes, there are stray reports in the literature of kiddos getting hyperglycemia from antipsychotics) and death.

Anyhow, McManamy largely delivers a historical account of the development of the paradigm (as he did in his newsletter in late February), and also adds this about some critics of the bipolar child paradigm:

“There is a lot of misunderstanding on the topic. Some people think that diagnosing young kids with a mental illness is a plot by drug companies. Others deny that kids can even get bipolar. Others call it a fad diagnosis.

Many of these individuals are pushing an antipsychiatry agenda. Others are narcissistic bloggers who specialize in interviewing their own keyboards. But even the most rabid in their midst do raise legitimate concerns about putting kids on dangerous meds for a diagnosis we know very little about.”

Narcissistic bloggers? Rabid? Hm, I wonder to whom he’s referring. McManamy doesn’t single out anyone, but I’ll consider myself dinged by implication since I have written quite a bit on my doubts about the bipolar child paradigm.

McManamy spends much of his post and newsletter crediting the Papoloses for creating the paradigm.

McManamy states that in the 1990s America was, in essence, beset with moody, misbehaving children and that the Papoloses were staring into a research void when they went about researching their book. Although it’s not like there weren’t plenty of studies on bipolar disorder in children aged 0 to 12 years old, according to PubMed:

0-12 years old: 583 in the 1990s (58 articles per year) 0-12 years old: 917 in the 2000s (147 articles per year to March 15, 2007)

I am far from the only person questioning where the hell this diagnosing and medicating is leading us. The New York Times has poked at the issue, fairly aggressively by mainstream media standards. Judith Warner, a columnist at the paper, has written two columns defending the medication of children, which led to gobs of comments on her blog (which is sadly behind the Times Select subscription firewall). CBS’s evening news also had a piece on medicating children recently, which led to a recent comment by a psychologist at PsychCentral:

“My philosophy is that being overly-cautious to diagnose and prescribe for children is a smart route to take. Certainly there are cases that are very serious and need creative methods of treatment. But otherwise I hold some concern about the issue primarily because of the lack of research.”

Both CL Psych, an actual psychologist, and Maria at Intueri, an actual psychiatrist, have raised serious questions about diagnostic criteria. So have others in the field.

I agree that there are likely a small number of cases that justify treatment of some kind, but I think that the Papoloses, the Harvard bipolar child mafia and others have over-stepped the proper boundaries of their profession by pressing for the legitimacy of the bipolar child paradigm and its application to millions of children.

To hit a kiddo with a diagnosis that will lead to a lifetime of social discrimination is unethical and mean.

To medicate children with drugs that are known to cause a reduction in brain volume in research monkeys and diabetes, hyperglycemia, cardiac problems, boosted cholesterol levels and, yes, early deaths in adults is also unethical. This isn’t a plot by Big Pharma. No, it is the result of overlapping interests of pharmaceutical companies who want to maximize profits, research psychiatrists hungry for the academic prestige of publication, advocacy groups convinced of their righteousness, an FDA that is asleep at the switch and parents who are, in my opinion, backing off their responsibilities as protectors of their children’s physical and psychological liberties.

I have to question the social imperative behind all of this–it’s not like these kids are shooting off guns in the street or threatening the well being of America at large. Maybe I am too much the social libertarian, but I think it is madness for our society to demand that anyone–child, teen or adult–be medicated unless they are a clear and present danger to the physical liberty and bodily integrity of other members of society. If an adult wants to address a flaw of mood and feeling and personal behavior by taking meds, then go right ahead. (I have for 18 years with mixed results.) But to force Seroquel, Risperdal and Zyprexa, for example, upon innocent tempermental, moody children who have little control of their own individual liberty is delusional.

It smacks of the kind of social control that once led to forced lobotomies in adults.

This is a controversial matter in adults, I know, and there are people like Fuller Torrey and the editorialists at the Los Angeles Times who disagree with me and passionately so. The Times won a Pulitzer Prize a few years ago for editorializing that homeless people in Los Angeles should be, in essence, forced to take psych meds, for example.

But now that we are talking about children, I have to be skeptical. The current dominant paradigm in psychiatry, the psychopharmacological biologically-based one, is not producing appropriate results for adults who embrace its precepts, as I once did, so we are insisting upon the legitimacy of medicating children for what reasons. Or is it because we have already forgotten Rebecca Riley?

If it’s narcissism for anyone to question the bipolar child paradigm, then color me the king of self-love.

• Creativity: A Crime Of Passion — creative children are often those who are called difficult
• Drugging our children to death
•  The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study
•  Childhood trauma once again linked to mental health issues in adulthood
•  The Toxic Stress of Early Childhood Adversity (trauma)
• The legacy of childhood trauma
•  PTSD versus a post traumatic response
•  Generational pain

***

Support Everything Matters: Beyond Meds. Make a donation with PayPal or if you’d like to contribute to food as medicine, a Kroger eGift card works too!