Mind Altering Drugs for Kids...Dare to Say No!

A report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media.This week’s item focuses on psychology and is excerpted from Insight Magazine.“The numbers are alarming.The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that as many as 1.5 million children and adolescents, that’s 2.5% of all Americans under age 18, are seriously depressed.The AmericanAcademy of and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry puts the number of significantly depressed children and adolescents at 3.4 million.More startling still, the number of children ages 5 and younger taking the most commonly prescribed anti-depressants increased from 8000 to 40,000 in one year according to IMS Health, a pharmaceutical research firm in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania.During that same 12 month period from 1996 to 1997 the total number of youngsters 17 and younger, who were prescribed Prozac, or its primary competitors, Zoloft and Paxil, rose by more than 120,000 to 792,000.It’s no longer rare for doctors to prescribe those drugs for children as young as four, says Donald L. Rosenblitt, medical director of The Lucy Daniels Center for Early Childhood, a therapeutic nursery in Cary, North Carolina.“They are doing it more often, probably more often than I am comfortable with,” Rosenblitt says.There is no information yet on the long term effects of these drugs on the developing brain,” he adds.The enormous weight of evidence so far, is that antidepressants do not help childhood depression.

Tom:

Wow, this is really a scary article, Martin and Deidre, don’t you agree?

Martin:

Yes, it’s a frightening article and what we see here is that over the years, we have gone to a medicalizing of problems of living.The medicalization of these problems—there are biological problems in life, whether it has to do with the body or the brain, but what’s happened is the medicalization has spread prolifically and as more and more and more subtle drugs (subtle drugs are those that don’t have as many side affects) have come along, it’s not only been a medicalization of our problems, but the use of drugs to deal with these problems, that have been medicalized and then its not only going to the general population, but it’s being pushed downward as young as possible.These types of drugs are not even in certain cases, the manufacturer of the drug admits that it shouldn’t be used for children.The tests haven’t been done on children and so therefore it’s not prescribed for children. The doctors themselves have the ability to take the “off the label” so-to-speak and go ahead and prescribe it for almost anybody they want.So they’re prescribing it for younger, and younger and younger children.So what we’re doing is drugging more prolifically than we ever have, younger children and younger than we ever have.So we’re medicalizing the problem, we’re proliferating it throughout the entire population, and we’re pushing downward to the youngest possible and most potentially affected by long term results that we know nothing about.

Tom:

Martin now, some people who complain that we are even addressing something like this; they would say well you guys are really way out of your field here.This is a scientific medical problem, this has to do with brain chemistry and it’s science which you can’t speak to.But Martin isn’t it true that the diagnosis of this depression comes through and interview, not from any kind of medical testing?

Martin:

Yes, what happens is, (I always give this example) if you give 100 patients to a doctor and purge from their records anything verbal that they said, and tell the doctor that they can do any kind of biological examination of them, but you can’t talk to them, now select those individuals that are bipolar depression, or just straight depression and the doctor will tell you right away “I can’t I have to talk to the patient in order to find out.”So it’s a matter that the doctors have to receive verbal information about the state that the person is in rather than the biological markers as to what the state is of the person.

Tom:

So let’s say a three year old or a four year old child sits in the corner sucking his thumb and he doesn’t want any part of what his mom or dad tell him to do, this could be a candidate for Prozac or something like that, correct?

Deidre:

Yes, and it doesn’t take much of the behavior of a child being unhappy for parents to become alarmed.We kind of live in a world now where if people are unhappy or sad, they are going to be considered needing some kind of medical or psychological help.But you know there are a lot of things in our society that are different now and it isn’t that psychology is going to help and it isn’t that all of these brain chemicals are going to help.When you think of the amount of time that children spend watching television, when you think of the amount of time that children are with their parents; you have a huge amount of time with television and with more and more parents working you have less and less time of just quiet simple activity.It used to be that we used to play with things and do things that would be boring to a child these days.

Tom:

Right, because of the—well basically because of the passive viewing, but the things that they’re viewing move along at such an incredible rate of activity, it’s a strange phenomenon.

Deidre:

Yes, and the things the children must be absorbing from the television, so much of it being not true and not really related to their own life.Then they apply that to their life, you’d be better off to turn off the television than to recommend any type of drugs.

Martin:

Yes and back to your comment about can we make comments about these biochemical things if that’s not our field.People can read the results of research and I think most people know that the doctor’s main line of information is actually the pharmaceutical company representative not something he’s researched himself.So they are taking the word of the pharmaceutical rep based upon the studies the pharmaceuticals have done and they are huge corporations with lots of money and what’s happening is that we are drugging too many at too young an age and it’s a consequence we may have to reap in the future because unfortunately of the long term affects of these drugs that we know very little about.