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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/pringle04212010.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/pringle04212010.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">April 21,
2010<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>The Psychiatric
Drugging of Children <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Inventing Disorders
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By EVELYN
PRINGLE <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">O</font><font size=3>f
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."<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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."<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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. <br><br>
"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:<br><br>
"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. <br><br>
"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."<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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. <br><br>
"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.<br><br>
Because having just one label was very limiting, Healy says, child
psychiatry "needed another disorderand for this reason bipolar
disorder was welcome." <br><br>
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."<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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."<br><br>
"They also cause a physical dependence," Healy states.
"Zyprexa is among the drugs most likely to cause people to become
physically dependent on it."<br><br>
"In addition," he points out, "these drugs are known to
cause a range of neurological syndromes, diabetes, cardiovascular
problems, and other problems."<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
"You have to go through these things," he said. "This is
how we learn to cope with the problems of life."<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
<b>Evelyn Pringle</b> is an investigative journalist focused on exposing
corruption in government and corporate America.<br><br>
(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) <br><br>
<br><br>
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