This makes me weep. What an awful bit of news to start off the new year. This is a crisis brewing that boggles my mind. Parents and doctors have lost their minds to let this happen. Let's not forget Risperdal causes breast growth in male kids -- irreversible breast growth. It's beyond belief really. We're wiping out a whole generation with these "treatments." Very surreal.

P.S. There's a typo in that first quote -- it should be "one in 329, in 2007."

re"I don't even know what to do to avert it anymore"
I suggest to stop agreeing to call the drugs "antipsychotics" as the children are not psychotic in a biotic way.
"Crimes are acts we commit. Diseases are biological processes that happen to our bodies. Mixing these two concepts by defining behaviors we disapprove of as diseases is a bottomless source of confusion and corruption." wrote Thomas Szasz.

this makes me so fucking ill.

That headline is unbelievable, what the hell has happened?! Toddlers on these drugs, you might as well be feeding them rat poison in the name of behavior control.

Nothing short of an armed revolution will stop these pharma whoring greed mongers @ this point.

Stop by your local county mental hospital. You will be astounded at how young the general populations are becoming, and this is only a warning shot fired into ominous night sky. The real carnage hasn't even reared it's true ugly head quite yet.

These children are hooked, disabled, labeled, and damaged for life. This is just what pharma and medicine has campaigned for; generation upon generation of infant cash cows to be milked of their very life essence continuously from cradle to coffin.

For all doctors out there; when an estimated 90% of MD's are on the take "accepting gifts, cash, or both" from pharma, there is no more questions about guilt or causation.

No worries right, every citizen is going to pay for these crimes in both monetary cost and human suffering for many decades to come; you can rest assured the vast majority of our corrupted government representatives know exactly what's happening, and will let these horrible crimes continue out of their unquenchable lust for money and power.

I believe Thomas Jefferson would have had some fairly choice and ear turning words for everyone of us about now.

This drug is a major tranquilizer. That's all. Really. It's about sedation. The reason this drug is called an anti psychotic is because of it's extreme sedating effect which makes the user sedated. The term anti psychotic somehow falsely implies that some chemical imbalance is being corrected. And the side effects of risperdal are hellish, but I'm preaching to the choir. Thanks for this piece.

Major tranquilizer use in toddlers doubled. Absurd, obscene.

it's kind of ironic, stephanie, because i think thorazine was originally used as rat poison.

I spent a few days around my two year old niece this past week. In a span of about 10 minutes she managed to stick an acorn up her nose, bite her older sister because she had the Playmobil baby Jesus "first!," hugged me on the leg and told me she loved me, took her diaper off and peed in the floor, ripped a few pages out of a magazine, played her favorite DVD for the 1000th time, screamed because she lost a doll's shoe, ate something off the floor, smiled a whole lot, cried a whole lot, looked up at me and said, "Pa'keesh?" (toddler speak for "capiche?"), and danced a little jig on the most adorable chunky little legs while completely naked. Being two is not a mental disorder.

It would be very interesting to see the indication(s) for these medications in this age group.

In my opinion, the parent who believes that Risperdal will help her toddler become less argumentative or more compliant is the same parent who believes Valium is the only way she can manage the stress of everyday life.

Of course, we psychiatrists are responsible for both travesties in our promotion of these "quick-fix" solutions for everyone's ills. The difference, though, is that toddlers don't have the opportunity to say no.

At what age do toddlers who receive antipsychotics receive the most vitiating of all mental health dictums, the "Prophecy of Doom" - "You are too old, too sick and have been in the system for too long to get any better." It is a tragedy.

Exactly, Joe. Not many people understand that.

I'm 30 and taking Risperdal caused me memory loss, I slept all the time and was severely depressed, if it affects me as an adult like that, god knows what it does to 2-5 year olds, the idea of putting little kids on this drug is horrific, taking it nearly ruined my life.

We are violating the bodies of little children who can't even understand or communicate what is happening to them. This should be a crime. At the very least it is an unforgivable sin.

An even greater tragedy is what we all know about antipsychotic use: that once you get on one, it's only a matter of time before you're on some other medication. It's pretty much a given that if you're taking an antipsychotic, you're also taking some other med to control the side effects (lethargy/depression, urinating oneself, bowel problems, etc..) of being on the antipsychotic. Of course the majority of the side effects will be labeled by the doc as the result of the kid's/teens/adults original condition. Or this psychiatrist gem: "Oh, I've never heard of the antipsychotic causing . You should get it checked out by your pediatrician." Haven't these asshole doctors realized that everyone's body is different and that just because you've never seen a particular side effect in your client base, that maybe a new effect might slip in there from time to time, especially when you're giving these kinds of meds to five year olds?

All right, that's it. Who wants to rent a bus to Washington and do a sit-in? I've heard enough outrage for a lifetime.

Informed consent is out the window when prescribing to toddlers, and then of course there is metabolic syndrome, diabetes, weight gain, lipids in question, thyroid, liver damage, permanent movements, ocular dysfunction, death.

This SHOULD be ILLEGAL, what the hell is the FDA good for? allowing drugs to be freely marketed based on skewed and hidden data, all the while AstraZeneca is embroiled in litigation for people suing from diabetes from Seroquel use, Rebecca Riley dead at age 4, Destiny dead at age 3....

PBS Medicated Child depicts several kids with permanent damage done to them, there are parents who read this blog who have had children DIE from these drugs and others who have lived with their now adult children while they suffered body damage and permanent static brain malfunctioning....if anyone considers these tranquilizers for behavior control or other off-label use, they need to consider what another form of child abuse is.

Thank you Lisa! I agree. Sarah is right. I don't know if I even believe in sin but if it exists this is going to go down in the books as a major one. Unforgivable for certain.

And Miranda - Maybe Philip wouldn't mind letting us gather all his articles on the subject and give us access to his sources of the info (if he has them handy) and I can make a simple website using this and other info and throw it up online. It could be linked to from this site and various other pharma sanity/insanity sites. I could probably figure out how to make it capable of taking donations if that's what's needed. I am certain I can make it show up on the 1st few pages of a Google search for relevant terms such as "antipsychotic use in children", and with that plus the links from cites like Philips we could actually raise enough money to rent a couple buses and actually do a sit in.
At the very least it would show up as a another source of alternative info for parents who are considering putting their child on antipsychotics and have no other info except what the doctor is telling them, the hard to decipher abstracts that show up for these types of web searches, the phrma promotional crap and the few articles here and there by NYTimes and other newspapers.
If people do decide to start donating either time or money to that cause there could be a real difference made.

It makes me want to cry thinking of children the age of my niece being pumped full of these way-to powerful-and-risky drugs (as I know from experience) with absolutely no way to stand up for themselves and describe the horrible sadness and loss of vibrancy in life they experience by taking these drugs. Not to mention the long term effects they can't even conceptualize.

I understand antipsychotics for children who are so extremely ill that they are uncontrollably violent and suicidal, and for whom everything else has been tried. But there CAN NOT POSSIBLY BE THAT MANY CHILDREN WHO ARE THAT BAD OFF TO WARRENT THIS LEVEL OF "TREATMENT"!

Something has to be done to stop it. And I do not mind doing my part if there are a couple other people willing to put a little effort towards it. Even if I have to start on my own and find them later.

So Philip - You have my email in this comment, let me know if you know anyone else who would like to get started on actually doing something about this. Feel free to give my email address to the poster above Miranda. Could you pass along to here that she should use the title of this blog in her subject line so I don't lose it in the spam?
Let me know if there is a problem with that. I just don't want to post my email here. Not unless I set up a separate one just for this.

As a veteran activist I've seen that collective action works; it's documentable.

I think the "Mad Pride" movement, such as MindFreedom, needs to join up with everyone else (including us garden variety neurotics) who identifies in some way as a psychiatry "victim" --along with parents, friends, and partners of same as well as enlightened health professionals such as those from the ICSPP, functional and integrative medicine, orthomolecular medicine, the docs who do the Pharmed Out site....and build our own "pink ribbon" campaign against out of control biopsych. If we do, they can't just call us Scientologists and turn their backs anymore.

Philip, feel free to e-hook me up with katielou82.