[News] The Psychiatric Drugging of Children

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/pringle04212010.html

April 21, 2010


The Psychiatric Drugging of Children


Inventing Disorders

By EVELYN PRINGLE

Of all the harmful actions of modern psychiatry, 
"the mass diagnosing and drugging of children is 
the most appalling with the most serious 
consequences for the future of individual lives 
and for society," warns the world-renowned 
expert, Dr Peter Breggin, often referred to as the "Conscience of Psychiatry."

"We're bringing up a generation in this country 
in which you either sit down, shut up and do what 
you're told, or you get diagnosed and drugged," he points out.

Breggin considers the situation to be "a national 
tragedy."  "To inflict these drugs on the growing 
brains of infants and children is wrong and abusive," he contends.

The kids who get drugged are often our best, 
brightest, most exciting and energetic children, 
he points out. "In the long run, we are giving 
children a very bad lesson that drugs are the answer to emotional problems."

Dr Nathaniel Lehrman, author of the book, "Coming 
Off Psychiatric Drugs," believes that giving 
infants and toddlers "powerful, brain-effecting 
psychiatric medication is close to criminal activity."

"Giving them these drugs," he says, "has no 
rationale, and ignores the basic fact that 
youngsters are very sensitive to their 
environments, both social and chemical, with the 
juvenile brain easily damaged by the latter."

During an interview on ABC Radio National in 
August 2007, Dr David Healy, the noted British 
pharmacology expert, and author of the book, 
"Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder," 
told reporter Jane Shields:  "Just to give you a 
feel for how crazy things have actually got 
recently, it would appear that clinicians in the 
US are happy to look at the ultrasounds of 
children in the womb, and based on the fact that 
they appear to be more overactive at times, and 
then possibly less active later, they're prepared 
to actually consider the possibility that these children could be bipolar."

On April 9, 2009, Christopher Lane, author of the 
book, "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a 
Sickness," published an interview on his 
Psychology Today blog with Dr Healy. In the 
interview, Healy explained the history behind the 
drastic rise in the sale of anticonvulsants and 
antipsychotics as "mood stabilizers," and the diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

"The key event in the mid-1990s that led to the 
change in perspective was the marketing of 
Depakote by Abbott as a mood stabilizer," Healy 
tells Lane, and further explains:

"Mood stabilization didn’t exist before the 
mid-1990s. It can’t be found in any of the 
earlier reference books and journals. Since then, 
however, we now have sections for mood 
stabilizers in all the books on psychotropic 
drugs, and over a hundred articles per year 
featuring mood stabilization in their titles.

"In the same way, Abbott and other companies such 
as Lilly marketing Zyprexa for bipolar disorder 
have re-engineered manic-depressive illness. 
While the term bipolar disorder was there since 
1980, manic-depression was the term that was 
still more commonly used until the mid-1990s when 
it vanishes and is replaced by bipolar disorder. 
Nowadays, over 500 articles per year feature bipolar disorder in their titles."

"As of 2008, upwards of a million children in the 
United States­in many cases preschoolers­are on 
"mood-stabilizers" for bipolar disorder, even 
though the condition remains unrecognized in the 
rest of the world," Healy points out.

"But there is no evidence that the drugs 
stabilize moods," he says. "In fact, it is not 
even clear that it makes sense to talk about a mood center in the brain."

"A further piece of mythology aimed at keeping 
people on the drugs," he reports, "is that these 
are supposedly neuroprotective­but there's no 
evidence that this is the case and in fact these 
drugs can lead to brain damage."

Healy says the FDA's decision to add a black-box 
warning about suicide to SSRIs likely had little 
to do with the switch to prescribing 
antipsychotics as safer for children. What "was 
quite striking was how quickly companies were 
able to use the views of the few bipolar-ologists 
who argued that when children become suicidal on 
antidepressants it's not the fault of the drug," he points out.

"The problem, they said, stems from a mistaken 
diagnosis and if we could just get the diagnosis 
right and put the child on mood stabilizers then 
there wouldn't be a problem," he explains.

"There is no evidence for this viewpoint, but it 
was interesting to see how company support could 
put wind in the sails of such a perspective," he says.

Because having just one label was very limiting, 
Healy says, child psychiatry "needed another 
disorder­and for this reason bipolar disorder was welcome."

He reports that the same thing is happening to 
children labeled with ADHD. "Not all children 
find stimulants suitable," he advises, "and just 
as with the SSRIs and bipolar disorder it has 
become very convenient to say that the stimulants 
weren't causing the problem the child was 
experiencing; the child in fact had a different 
disorder and if we could just get the diagnosis 
correct, then everything else would fall into place."

A report titled, "Adverse Events Associated with 
Drug Treatment of ADHD: Review of Postmarketing 
Safety Data," presented at the FDA's March 22, 
2006, Pediatric Advisory Committee meeting bears 
witness to Healy's explanation by stating in 
part: “The most important finding of this review 
is that signs and symptoms of psychosis or mania, 
particularly hallucinations, can occur in some 
patients with no identifiable risk factors, at 
usual doses of any of the drugs currently used to treat ADHD.”

Between January 2000, and June 30, 2005, the FDA 
identified nearly 1,000 cases of psychosis or 
mania linked to the drugs in its own database and 
those from the drug makers themselves.

The antipsychotics are just as dangerous as the 
SSRI antidepressants, Healy says. "Long before 
the antidepressants were linked with akathisia, 
the antipsychotics were universally recognized as 
causing this problem," he explains in the Lane 
interview. "It was also universally accepted that 
the akathisia they induce risked precipitating 
the patient into suicidality or violence."

"They also cause a physical dependence," Healy 
states. "Zyprexa is among the drugs most likely 
to cause people to become physically dependent on it."

"In addition," he points out, "these drugs are 
known to cause a range of neurological syndromes, 
diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and other problems."

"It's hard to understand how blind clinicians can 
get to problems like these, especially in 
youngsters who grow obese and become diabetic 
right before their eyes," Healy tells Lane.

As for what he calls the "medicalization of 
childhood," in the radio interview, Healy points 
out that "children always have been unhappy, they 
always have been nervous, but that's actually 
part and parcel of being a child."

"You have to go through these things," he said. 
"This is how we learn to cope with the problems of life."

Children can best be helped in the safest way, he 
says, "if they're just seen and if they actually 
have the opportunity to talk about their 
problems, and if they get basic and sensible 
input about how to perhaps help them cope with these problems."

Healy said it's important to remember that severe 
mental illness is rare in children and that most 
children with a mental health problem do not need 
medication. Children are being picked up and put 
on pills "who really don't need to be on these 
pills and who are going to be injured by them," he warned.

"I think possibly 10 to 15 years up the road," he 
told Shields, "we're going to be looking at a 
generation of children who will have been 
seriously injured by the treatments that they 
appear ever-increasingly likely to be put on now."

But the administration of multiple drugs at once 
complicates the situation so that it may be 
impossible to determine which drugs are most 
responsible for the adverse reactions  children 
experience, according to Dr Breggin.

"Because so many doctors and so many drug 
companies will share the blame for mistreating 
these children, they will be unable to seek 
redress against individual perpetrators through 
the courts when they grow up," he explains.

Evelyn Pringle is an investigative journalist 
focused on exposing corruption in government and corporate America.

(This report is one of a series of articles 
focused on the rising rates of psychiatric 
drugging in the US and is sponsored by the 
International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology)




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