From the Washington Post, most foster care children on antipsychoctic drugs get them for far too long and without medical justification. 2/3 of the nearly 700 claims studied raised high-risk “quality of care” issues.
As a long time CASA volunteer guardian ad-Litem, many of my case kids were on multiple drugs simultaneously and many of them hated being forced to use them. Some kids threw the drugs away.
In Minneapolis, I would like to know (there should be more transparency) if six year old Kendrea Johnson’s suicide by hanging involved psychotropic medications. She was a very troubled foster child, in therapy and had talked about homicide and suicide. When Jeff Weise killed himself, his grandfather and 14 others he had talked about suicide and homicide and was taking Prozac.
7 year old foster child Gabriel Myers hung himself and left a note about how he hated Prozac. KARA’s video interviews include families, a City Councilman, and other professionals talking about antipsychotic medications, very young children and suicide. This subject needs our attention now. It is cruel punishment for a child suffering from the traumas of abuse and removal from a birth home.
There are 3 children’s hospitals in the metro area and NO children’s mental health hospitals and there are 800 to 1000 emergency psychiatric visits at HCMC every month (many of them children).
This conversation is overdue.
What we don’t know cannot be dealt with and will not be improved. Let’s stop the next awful six year old suicide.
read the whole Washington Monthly article here
an overmedicated teen in foster care, Steven Unangst, died in Antioch, California. The report cited a 10-old-year with ADHD given an antipsychotic — without any medical documentation — mixed in with other psych drugs; a 4-year-old on four psychotropic drugs, including two antipsychotics; and a 16-year-old with bipolar disorder on six psychiatric medications, including variously three antipsychotics. Among the side effects of this polypharmacy assault: “This child experienced paranoia, hostility, unstable mood, hallucinations, and suicidal thoughts. This child also experienced significant side effects potentially resulting from the prescribed drugs, including a 22-pound weight gain, insomnia, and edema (swelling) of hands and feet.”
Perhaps even more damning, the report found, 92 percent of all kids on Medicaid receiving antipsychotics don’t have any of the limited “medically accepted pediatric conditions” supposedly justifying their use. These “accepted conditions” include the authority to use antipsychotics even for autistic children as young as 5 for such dubious FDA-approved conditions as “irritability.”