Illegal Child Drugging Scandal: Alarming Revelations

Illegal Child Drugging Scandal: Alarming Revelations
The number of foster children on powerful psychiatric drugs was badly underreported, child-welfare bosses reveal.
The shocking numbers emerging from Florida’s investigation into psychiatric intervention in its foster care service represent a virtual pandemic of child drugging.

Nearly thirty percent of teenage Florida foster children have been prescribed a mental-health drug, and no less than 73 foster kids younger than 6 are taking mind-altering drugs, according to a study released on Thursday. In all, 2,669 children of Florida foster children are being given powerful psychiatric drugs.

This represents roughly a third more kids than a Department of Children and Families (DCF) database had reported as taking mental-health drugs: state records had seriously underreported the use of such drugs. Many of the drugs being illegally given to kids have never been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use on children, and many are linked to serious side effects.

Investigation
The figures are the result of an investigation launched in response to the suicide of a seven year old foster child who was taking such medications. The child who took his own life, Gabriel Myers, had been given psychiatric drugs in the weeks leading up to his suicide. The drugs included anti-depressants that are linked to a high risk of suicide among children.

In violation of the law, neither Gabriel's parents nor a judge had consented to the use of such drugs.

''Normally, a 7-year-old boy is learning how to read and tie his shoes,'' said the DCF director. "It is incomprehensible to me even now that a child so young may have deliberately and consciously made a decision to end his life.''

Certainly one can but wonder what kind of distress the boy must have been suffering and why nothing effective was done to help him and, echoing the outrage of many observers and concerned citizens, he added that he had ''serious questions'' about the use of mental-health drugs on children.

Chemical Restraints
Worse even than the numbers involved in the abuse, are the possible motives behind the child drugging.

It has emerged that for almost a decade, Florida child advocates have complained that mental-health drugs are being used as ''chemical restraints'' to control some foster kids but their legitimate concerns appear to have been disregarded.

Andrea Moore, a former head of Florida's Children First who first suggested child-welfare workers were relying on mental-health drugs to control behavior, said, ''The shift-care workers at group homes are much more likely to report sadness and crying as depression, or anxiousness as some sort of mental-health problem,'' Ms Moore said.

Reporting "depression" and thus labeling the child mentally ill provides justification for drugging in an effort to render the child more malleable and, sadly, is in line with the common psychiatric practice of labeling normal human behavior an "illness" requiring psychiatric intervention.

But as Ms Moore pointed out: "You'd be sad and anxious, too, if you didn't know where you were going to live from day to day.''

Can any of us imagine what such a situation must be like for a small and helpless child? Certainly labeling a normal reaction to a distressing situation as a mental illness and using this as an excuse to drug with particularly dangerous chemicals that can set in train lifelong damage, appears to be the height not only of irresponsibility but of cruelty too.

It has emerged that caregivers were once told they did not need consents for mental-health drugs in certain cases -- meaning there may be significant numbers of incidences of drugging not listed at all!

Among the 20,235 children whose case files were studied, investigators found no parental or judicial consent on record for 16 percent of the children, the report said.

The report produced by the DCF outlines steps administrators will take.

These include:
• State child-welfare lawyers will seek permission to drug their children from parents who still have authority to make decisions on their children's behalf, or go to court to seek approval from a judge to start drugging.

• Administrators are launching an ''immediate'' review to determine how reliable the state's child-welfare database is. It is not clear to this writer what steps will be take to ensure that database becomes one hundred percent accurate.

• DCF administrators and the heads of private foster-care agencies throughout the state will discuss the use of psychiatric drugs by foster children weekly by telephone.

''The purpose of these calls is to ensure effective communication on improvements that must take place,'' the report said.

It is as yet unclear what precisely will be discussed and whether the discussion will include valid and highly workable alternatives to drugging or if those involved are even aware that such alternatives exist.

''This report is an important first step in closely examining not only this case -- but to help ensure this type of tragedy never happens again,'' the DCF Director said at a Thursday news conference.

Unfortunately, psychiatric drugs being what they are and having the side effects they are known to have, while their use continues there can be no guarantees the tragedy will not happen again.

Concern
There appears to be no news yet as to what will be done about psychiatrists and other care workers who broke the law relating to child drugging.

Equally cause for concern, the undertakings listed above seem to indicate a determination to go on drugging foster kids as long as the letter of the law is adhered to, whereas the whole concept of psychiatric involvement, particularly as this invariably means drugging, in the care of children is in urgent need of a rethink.

Several matters need to be urgently examined:
The scientific validity of the "disorders" or "mental illnesses" with which children are labeled as an excuse to drug them.

The number of people labeled "mentally ill" who are "cured" by the drugs they are given as opposed to the numbers who are merely drugged indefinitely without cure.

The number of children thus drugged who develop mental health "complications" including later addiction to street drugs.

The deterioration in performance in areas of life at local, state and national level, such as education, mental health and drug rehabilitation where psychiatry has been allowed to intervene.

The ineffectiveness of drugging in curing anything and its tendency to produce serious side effects and complications and the connection between serious crimes such as murders by youngsters and their medication by psychiatrists in the period preceding their crimes.

The percentage of drugged children who go on to become criminals at considerably exacerbated cost to both society and the state.

Why government is wasting taxpayers dollars on psychiatric methods when they are rendered outmoded by advances in knowledge of diet, nutrition and medicine is not clear. The state would not waste money on having leeches administered to sick children instead of antibiotics so why does it waste money on equally stone-age treatments for those emotionally troubled?

Whether it would be safer, healthier, kinder and more cost effective to spend money, not on psychiatry, but on ensuring effective nutrition and a safe, caring environment for foster kids.

Future
A race that fails to love and care for its children has abandoned its future. Most of us would like to think we do right by our young and that some kind of future is being ensured for our civilization.

We would appreciate our governments’ help in the matter.

About The Author
For more information about psychiatry at Citizens Commission and addiction at Narconon.
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/illegal-child-drugging-scandal-alarming-revelations.html