Doping America's Foster Kids

I'm glad to see that smaller papers are poking into questions around diagnosing small children with mental illnesses and giving them medications that don't perform well for adults and are damn near unresearched altogether in children. Here's what the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle found among its area's foster children:

"In 2002, about a third of the county's foster care population, 327 children, were prescribed one or more common psychotropic drugs. By the end of 2006, the number had increased about 40 percent to 457 foster children, or almost half of the county foster care population....2006 records show that more than one of every eight foster children in Monroe County is on some kind of drug to combat psychosis, a severe form of mental illness characterized by lost contact with reality."

How much you want to bet that the kids on anti-psychotics aren't schizophrenic--an extremely rare condition in small children--but are being diagnosed with alleged child bipolar disorder and ADHD? On what medical grounds are docs medicating these children with anti-psychotics? American's struggle to silence its rowdy youngsters, foster kids or not, seems to be as out of hand in the Rochester area as anywhere else.

The details of all of this are wild: "a 1-year-old foster child was prescribed the antipsychotic drug Risperdal, and two 4-year-old foster children were prescribed Depakote." A 1-year-old on Risperdal? That's insane and amounts to child abuse in my mind. Keep in mind the kid would barely be old enough to walk and likely isn't even speaking, so how would a doctor legitimately diagnose them with anything and then stick them on what the Arkansas AG alleges to be a defective drug?

Fortunately, not all the docs in the area are playing along with the Harvard bipolar child mafia's playbook:

"'I have no doubt that many, many kids are overmedicated,' said Dr. Martin Irwin, a Syracuse-area psychiatrist who has been contracted by counties and treatment centers around the state to help decrease the use of psychotropic drugs for foster children.

"'It's out of control in general, but the worst problems are in foster care because there's basically nobody advocating for the kid.'"

Read the entire article, which is quite well done, for more.

To be fair to the other side, here's one parent who seems perfectly happy to have her child on Abilify and asks an interesting questions about the Abilify TV ad.