The suicide rate among military veterans has ballooned in recent years, in part because of overmedication of service members and a lack of support for veterans, advocates for treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder said Thursday. Psychiatrists sometimes prescribe drugs as a cure without an actual understanding of what the drugs do, said Dr. Peter R. Breggin, a psychiatrist and author from Ithaca, N.Y.
Sixteen months after 7-year-old Gabriel Myers committed suicide while taking psychotropic drugs, the state of Florida has banned allowing any children in the state’s custody from participating in clinical drug trials.
Patient advocates filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday charging that New Jersey psychiatric hospitals routinely medicate patients against their will without a review by an outside arbiter, a practice that is banned in most other states.
We spend more than £250 m a year on antidepressants in the UK – and it’s a complete waste of money. They are not much better than sugar pills, they have nasty side – effects, such as sexual dysfunction, and they increase young people’s risk of suicide. New research shows they don’t even work on the brain in the way we thought they did.
Some critics insist too many foster parents, lacking the skill or patience to work with troubled children who arrive as strangers, are still too quick to see medication as the way to curb problem behavior or just keep foster children quiet, no matter the side effects. But whatever the truth of that, the study group recommended some good changes, and one made sense immediately, I thought: Ban the use of foster kids in drug trials.