By Trace
Karen Vigneault wrote me an email with this op-ed and said "So sad, we are such a disposable society."
We are a disposable society. We in America have collectively lost our minds! As I wrote I my memoir, I could have been medicated and drugged for
many behaviors as an adoptee/child, but that was the 1960s and they weren’t drugging
adoptees then. In order to cope, I had developed an obsessive compulsive
disorder. Eventually my OCD did go
away but by then I was a young adult. It helped I had "talk therapy' at age 22.
I also wrote about my foster care training in Oregon when I had 12 weeks of training and one class on “Medicating -- YES or NO" -- and the social workers showed us a film. In fact in 1995, YES, drugging was highly RECOMMENDED. They suggested foster parents/adopters get
drugs for newly-adopted children and foster children. One father in the film said it was absolutely necessary for his son to be heavily medicated. (I recall there was quite a discussion among 20 of us in this class. I was the only single person.)
We have lost our minds (thanks to BIG PHARMA) if we believe drugs help children. If you really think about it, “children” are expected to be
tranquil, compliant, grateful and act a certain way as children, even though many of us children have been lost and exposed to the gravest injustices being taken from our mothers and
families. The children are expected to accept strange new people as parents and smile as though
nothing's happened.
I was so afraid as a child.
Reading this latest article, I am very afraid for all the new children thrust into this system of insanity.
The Drugging of Children in Foster Care
It's no secret that here in
America, foster children are being prescribed psychiatric drugs, especially
neuroleptics, as a means of controlling their behavior. A great deal has
been said and written on the matter. Politicians have declared the practice
deplorable. Children's advocacy groups have expressed concern, and, of
course, those of us in the antipsychiatry movement have screamed till we're
hoarse. But the problem persists.
For the past six months or
so, the San Jose Mercury News, a California newspaper, has been running
frequent articles on this topic, calling for oversight and corrective action.
Here are some quotes:
"California's foster
care system 'has grown more addicted to mind-altering medication,' the chair of
a powerful Senate committee told a packed public hearing in the state Capitol
on Tuesday, adding that 'here in California, we've done little to act on this
alarming issue.'"
"Lightbourne said two
state-sponsored panels have spent years working to develop guidelines that
would protect foster children from the excessive use of psych medications and
to house fewer kids at residential group homes, where drugs are most frequently
prescribed. Foster children deserve 'nonmedical treatments whenever possible,'
Lightbourne said."
"'We need to shift our
thinking away from the primacy of psychiatric medications toward
relationships,' testified George Stewart, a Berkeley child psychiatrist who has
spent much of his career tapering severely traumatized children safely off
high-risk drug cocktails. 'We are going to look back on this era of great enthusiasm
for psychiatric medications and either scratch our heads or beat our heads. We
will look back in 20 years and say, 'What were we doing?'"
"Senators also said they
were alarmed by the newspaper's analysis that showed how pharmaceutical
companies lavish the state's foster care prescribers with millions of dollars
for meals, gifts, travel, speaking engagements and research grants -- a
practice Lightbourne called 'deeply troubling.' The newspaper found the doctors
who prescribed the most, typically were rewarded the most."
All of which tells a familiar
story. Pharma-psychiatry systematically targets foster children as
potential customers. They do this because the residents of foster homes,
group and individual, are a "captive audience," in the sense that the
foster parent or staff member will ensure that the resident takes the
pills. In this way, non-compliance – the great drain on pharma revenue –
becomes a non-issue.
Karen de Sá's article is
cogent, articulate, and powerful, and undoubtedly she and her colleagues are
raising awareness on this matter. But there was one paragraph in her
article that I felt warranted some additional discussion.
"Tuesday's four-hour
hearing before the Human Services Committee highlighted a package of bills
being introduced this month, following this newspaper's investigation 'Drugging
Our Kids,' which revealed nearly one in four foster care teens take psychiatric
drugs -- often to control behavior, not to treat mental illnesses. Most are
prescribed antipsychotics, a powerful class of psychiatric drugs with the most
harmful side effects."
Note the phrase
"…often to control behavior, not to treat mental illnesses."
What the author is missing here is that, within psychiatry's spurious
domain, misbehavior is a mental
illness. In fact, it is several mental illnesses. If a child is
frequently defiant, he has a mental illness
called oppositional defiant disorder. If he is given to outbursts of anger, he has a mental illness
called intermittent explosive disorder. If he is given to violating rules or infringing on the rights of others,
he has a mental illness called conduct disorder. If he is given to setting fires, he has a mental illness called
pyromania. If he is persistently angry and given to
very frequent temper tantrums, he has a mental illness called
disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. And, of course, if he is disruptive and inattentive in the classroom, he
has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. If the child's misbehavior
can't be shoe-horned neatly into any of these categories, psychiatry has two residual categories:
other specified disruptive,
impulse-control, and conduct disorder; and unspecified disruptive
impulse-control and conduct disorder.
Contrary to popular
opinion, no neurological pathology is required to establish these
"diagnoses."
So, by neatly re-labeling
every conceivable kind of misbehavior as a mental illness, psychiatry has
established turf in this field, and has legitimized the use of drugs to
"treat" this misbehavior.
This is the crux of the
entire debate. There is literally no significant problem of thinking,
feeling, and/or behaving that is not listed, either directly, or by
implication, in the DSM. So, Karen de Sá is incorrect. In the
looking-glass world of psychiatry, practitioners are notprescribing major tranquilizers to control
children's behavior. Rather, they are "treating mental
illnesses," with medications that have been proven by highly questionable
pharma research to be "effective and safe." We have actually
reached the position in our society where a physician who does not follow these practices could be held liable
for failure to treat.
And this is the
problem. Every attempt to eliminate, or even reduce, this widespread and
persistent practice, is doomed to failure as long as
psychiatry's spurious diagnoses are accepted as bona fide illnesses.
Because if childhood misbehavior is an illness, then psychiatrists and other
physicians are not using drugs to control
behavior, rather they are "treating," compassionately and
effectively, these "disabling illnesses."
Psychiatry, over the past
five decades, has systematically and deceptively pursued a self-serving policy
of medicalizing virtually every significant problem of thinking, feeling,
and/or behaving. Their pharma allies have provided the money, and
psychiatry has provided the credentials, in what is arguably the most
widespread and destructive swindle in human history. And they have
been enormously successful. Their spurious
notions are widely accepted today as reality.
No significant progress will
be possible in these areas until the swindle is finally and utterly exposed,
and sanity is restored to our conceptualizations of human activity. Until
then, despite the protests of politicians, advocates, journalists, and others,
the pharma-psychiatry maw will remain wide open, and the ranks of "the
mentally ill" who need "treatment" will continue to grow.
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