Tag Archives: psychiatric drugs

The mass overmedication of foster children with psychiatric drugs

According to a recent study conducted by researchers at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute, about 4 percent of the general youth population has received prescriptions for these drugs during the past decade. By comparison, the numbers for children in foster care fall between 13 and 52 percent. This study corroborates the findings of similar studies conducted in Texas and Georgia during the same time period.

There are several debatable factors that can explain the disparity in prescription rates between children in foster care and the general youth population. While foster children may appear to suffer from a higher rate of behavioral and mental health concerns, many of these behavioral issues arise as a natural response to trauma and domestic stress, and are being improperly diagnosed as mental health disorders.

Mainstream psychiatry is failing – but there is another way

I am sick of seeing friends who are seriously mentally distressed neglected and damaged by mainstream psychiatry. I am fed up hearing about people being detained, locked up and forced to take damaging medication before anyone has found out why they are distressed. I am angry about children being forced to take addictive psychoactive drugs by health professionals because no one could be bothered to work out why they are playing up. I met some others who wanted to change things and together we formed an organisation called Speak Out Against Psychiatry.

PEOPLE’S PHARMACY:Can drugs cause violent behavior?

Americans revere personal responsibility. It resonates with our respect for accountability and frontier justice. That may explain why we have a hard time believing that medications could alter people’s personalities or lead them to behave badly. Violence as a drug side effect seems preposterous to patients, pharmacists, physicians and even juries. Trying to use the “Prozac defense” to justify killing or hurting someone is often met with scorn..

Antidepressant prescribing information, for example, warns physicians that, “All patients being treated with antidepressants for any indication should be monitored appropriately and observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, and unusual changes in behavior.” Drugs such as citalopram (Celexa), escitalopram (Lexapro), fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Paxil) and sertraline (Zoloft) carry warnings about aggressiveness, agitation, hostility, impulsivity and irritability.

The stop-smoking medication varenicline (Chantix) also comes with warnings about agitation, hostility, depressed mood and changes in behavior. The trouble with such warnings is that people don’t imagine that these bad things could happen to them.

The Voices Inside Their Heads – Gail Hornstein’s Approach To Understanding Madness

The term “mental illness” is heavily charged, politicized, and ambiguous. I prefer to talk about “anomalous experiences,” “extreme emotions,” and “emotional distress.” The main reason I don’t use medical language is that people who are suffering often don’t find it very helpful. No one experiences “schizophrenia” — that’s just a technical name for a lot of complicated feelings.

People who have been taught that “mental illnesses are brain diseases” see psychiatric patients as dangerous and unlikely to recover. And those in crisis are often understandably reluctant to consult mental-health professionals, because the stigma of mental illness is so severe: it’s possible to lose your job, your home, and your family as a consequence of being diagnosed with a mental illness. In cultures that take a social view of emotional distress, by contrast, people more readily seek help because they aren’t as likely to be ostracized and are assumed to be capable of full recovery.

52% of foster kids are prescribed psych drugs—One of them is fighting back

At just 6 years of age, still grieving over the death of the only mother he had ever known, his foster mother, Giovan Bazan would receive the first of many psychiatric ‘diagnoses’ and drugs that would plague him for the next twelve years of his life. Moved from foster home to foster home, orphanages and other modes of state care, Giovan was stigmatized with a plethora of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs until the age of 18, when he could finally make his own medical decisions and quit. Now a child advocate working part time at the Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) in Georgia, Giovan is on a mission: To get a full-time job with DFCS and help enact laws to combat the wholesale labeling and drugging of foster children. In the video below, Giovan tells his story and why he decided to fight back against the abuse of kids in foster care.