A Lesson For Dads and Moms All Over
Not long ago, the New York Times featured a profile on a young Louisiana boy known as Kyle Warren. Kyle, at just 18 months, had began taking a daily amount of antipsychotic drug treatments recommended for him by his pediatrician in an attempt to stem the boy’s severe temper fits. What then followed for young Kyle was a litany of medical professionals and diagnoses, everything from bipolar disorder, insomnia, Autism, and even the nebulous oppositional defiant dysfunction. Once he was three he was taking, on a daily basis, an antipsychotic, Prozac, two sleeping tablets and another tablet for attention-deficit disorder.
His parents worries rapidly moved from attempting to take care of his fits to concern over extreme alternations in his young personality. He was sedate, drooling and overweight–not how you would imagine a three-year-old boy to be.
Fortunately Kyle’s parents sought a second opinion and now, at six-years-old, Kyle is in the first grade and, based on the profile in the New York Times, scoring very high marks. Kyle however takes a daily pill for his attention deficit, but has been weened down from the dangerous cocktail of potent antipsychotics that marked his first years. What could be the most troubling is that Kyle is not alone.
According to the Times, far more than 500,000 kids and teenagers in the United States are at this moment taking antipsychotic medication, and the rate of 2-5 year olds taking these effective pills doubled from 2000 to 2007. Even far more upsetting, only 40 percent of those children had obtained a proper mental health evaluation in connection with their medications.
There’s no doubt that mental sickness is really a concern for any household, and when the indications of mental illness reveal in kids that problem is magnified noticeably. But there may be also no doubt that the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most powerful and influential within the United States, and their relationship with specific aspects of the medical industry is too cozy.
These antipsychotics are big revenue generators for drug corporations, and they promote them boldy to medical doctors. When those physicians are pediatricians, the marketing attempts include toys labeled with drug names. Medical doctors are even permitted to prescribe many potent drug treatments for off-label usage, including for preschoolers, even though research has not shown them to be risk-free or effective for young children.
Exacerbating the issue is the fact that medicating youngsters has proven itself to become much less expensive than traditional mental well being counseling. Drug makers have also done a very great job of playing off of the judgment that some link with counseling and therapy and changing that into the wide endorsement of using a pill prescribed by a doctor. It’s a vicious pattern for our kids and also the long-term issues stay undiagnosed.
Thankfully though a few of supporters are speaking out and getting attention to this concern. Mental illness has no silver bullet, but when it comes to our children, we require to become especially smart and patient.
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