Tag Archives: dangerous

Plea to free children from ‘chemical cages’

A photograph of an unnamed boy in a cage features in Sean O’Carroll’s exhibition about Ritalin.

A BOY crouches naked in a steel animal cage, with the downcast eyes of a prisoner.

This confronting image, meant to represent a ”chemical cage” of drugs to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is part of an exhibition called Ritalin by photographer Sean O’Carroll.

O’Carroll, a former teacher, said the exhibition expressed his concern about the widespread administering of what he called addictive mind-altering drugs to young boys, which was ”a catastrophic failure on the part of our society to deal with the challenge of raising active, energetic and ‘difficult’ boys”.

Australian Psychiatrist Patrick McGorry’s Global Agenda for “Pre-Psychosis Risk Syndrome” Takes A Hit from Former DSM Task Force Member, Psychiatrist Allen Frances

The “Psychosis Risk” proposal has stimulated widespread opposition (even I am told from within the Workgroup itself). The arguments against it are simply overwhelming. The false positive rate in predicting psychosis would be between 70-90%, meaning that between two and nine youngsters would be misidentified for every one accurately identified. The treatment most likely to be used would be antipsychotic medications. These have no proven efficacy in preventing psychosis, but most definitely have terrible side effects- especially enormous weight gain and its life threatening complications. These medications are overprescribed to those least able to resist- the young and those who are most financially disadvantaged.