Tag Archives: children

Bad Side-Effects Ahead For Pharma?

In 2006, The New York Review of Books reported that four-year-old Rebecca Riley died of the effects of two prescription drugs—Clonidine and Depakote.

These medications, along with Seroquel, were prescribed for Rebecca after she was diagnosed, at the age of two, with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and bipolar disorder. The three drugs are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treatment of ADHD or long-term treatment of bipolar disorder, nor are they approved for children as young as Rebecca.

The New York Review of Books‘ recent two-part article (1) by Marcia Angell on the treatment of mental illness with psychoactive drugs (those that affect the mental state) addresses an issue that may one day prove very important to investors in pharmaceutical stocks. (All statistics and quotations herein are drawn from Dr. Angell’s article.) It is not illegal for a doctor to prescribe a drug off-label, that is, for a non-FDA-approved use, but a drug marketer cannot lawfully encourage a doctor to do so. The profits in psychoactive drugs, however, make it tempting to flout the law. In the past four years, AstraZeneca (AZN), Pfizer (PFE), Eli Lilly (LLY), Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY) and Forest Labs (FRX) have all settled federal charges of marketing psychoactive drugs off-label, at a cost running into hundreds of millions.

The problem with the DSM

Do you have a shopping addiction disorder? Perhaps an addiction to food? Maybe one of your kids has Internet addiction disorder, or video-game attachment syndrome. Well, not quite yet, because these kinds of new mental diagnoses are only proposed, not final, for the new revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

And there is a terrible problem with this. The DSM was first created in the 1920s. Based on psychoanalytic theory, it enumerated fewer than 100 mental problems that a psychiatrist could diagnose, all of them attributable to environmental conditions, generally the role of parenting. We know now that this theoretical stance was limited and, in many cases, wrong. In 1980, the second revision of the DSM took place. Freud was discarded, and the revised bible now included several hundred disorders, all delineated by a list of observable symptoms and a framework for limiting and differentiating diagnoses.

Three versions later, the current DSM lists more than 1,000 disorders. No theories are espoused for their origins, though implicit in it is that there is a mix of genetic and environmental causes that shape neurological development. During this period of about three decades, the incidence of attention disorders in the general population has increased from 2 percent to 10 percent. In the 1980s, people diagnosed with bipolar disorder represented less than 1 percent of the population; now the number has increased to 5 percent. New diagnoses, like oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder, now cover as many as 5 percent of children.

Autism, which afflicted a tiny percentage of the population in the 1990s, now accounts for 1 out of every 100 children. What is wrong with this picture? Do we have an epidemic on our hands? Something in the water we drink, or the air we breathe?

Antipsychotics Have Dramatic Consequences in Kids, Study Shows

Doling out antipsychotic to kids for the first time can be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. Researchers found children can experience dramatic weight gain and insulin resistance just weeks after taking the drugs for the first time, Medscape.com reports. Lead researcher, John W. Newcomer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Miami, tells Medscape that prescribing antipsychotics has become trendy in the past 15 years or so — even though there is no sudden epidemic of schizophrenia in children. “The increase was due to the rising use of antipsychotics for disruptive behavior disorders,” he says.

Dosed in juvie jail: Troubled doctors hired to treat kids in state custody

By the time Florida started paying Dr. Gold Smith Dorval to counsel and medicate jailed children, the Pembroke Pines psychiatrist already had experience with kids in state custody. He had used them, authorities said, to bilk the government out of money for the poor. When Dorval pleaded no contest to a felony grand theft charge, it should have barred him, by law, from working for Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice. It didn’t.

And, like Dorval, other doctors have emerged from past troubles and gotten jobs at DJJ – with authority to prescribe drugs to kids in state jails, a Palm Beach Post investigation has found.

Some psychiatrists took DJJ jobs after they were cited for breaking the law, making grave medical missteps or violating state rules. Others were hired after they were accused of overmedicating patients, sometimes fatally.

All were empowered to prescribe drugs to jailed kids as powerful antipsychotic pills flowed freely into Florida’s homes for wayward children.

“It’s appalling. A psychiatrist is a psychiatrist. They’re licensed, they’ve been to medical school, and there is a certain trust placed in that person’s judgment when they tell you that this child needs to be medicated,” said John Walsh, an attorney with the Palm Beach County Legal Aid Society who has represented children in juvenile court. “This just illustrates that we always have to be on guard with children.”

Child victims of the chemical cosh: Boy who killed himself after taking Ritalin

Captured in a family video, Harry Hucknall gives a cheeky grin before whizzing off down the street on his new bike. His father, Darren, will never forget the moment — when Harry was seven — and often watches the scene again and again.

It is a precious memory of Harry who, one Sunday evening in September last year, kissed his mother Jane and older brother, David, goodnight before going upstairs to his bedroom and locking the door. He then hanged himself with a belt from his bunk bed.

He was ten years old.

His father blames Harry’s death on two ‘mind-altering’ drugs that his son had been prescribed by a psychiatrist to cure his boisterous behaviour and low spirits.