BSN Stock Photo

Psychiatric Drugging of Children - Intolerable

On September 2, 2008, the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights filed what is sure to become a landmark case against the State of Alaska aimed at stopping the over prescribing of psychiatric drugs to children covered by public health care programs in that state.

"The massive over-drugging of America's youth is an unfolding national horror," says attorney Jim Gottstein, the leader of the Law Project.

The lawsuit seeks an injunction to stop Alaska from authorizing or paying for psychotropic drugs prescribed to children in foster care or children covered by Medicaid "without safeguards being in place to make sure proper decision making occurs."

BSN Stock Photo

Ontario, Canada – “People just don’t ‘get it’ when it comes to ADHD,” Dr. Kenny Handelman explains. Too many individuals believe that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is not a “real” disorder that is more the results of poor parenting or a failure to discipline children.

Handelman, a child psychiatrist based in Ontario, Canada explains that that he is “on a mission” to change that way of thinking. He is already the author of a blog that exclusively deals with this childhood mental health disorder (www.ADDADHDblog.com), and the founder of the first fully interactive social networking site devoted exclusively for those with ADHD (www.ADHDWorld.com).

Now, Handelman is extending his advocacy role into the field of podcasts. His www.ADHD.tv is the first podcast to which people can subscribe through iTunes. Each edition of this podcast addresses an aspect of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

See larger cartoon below

Has the pharmaceutical industry become the Pied Piper of Hamelin--ridding us of lethal diseases only to turn around and "take" our children?

Would a physician from the 1950s "have identified the frenzy to treat bipolar disorders in infants that developed in twenty-first-century American as a mania?"

In his latest book, Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder (the John Hopkins University Press) David Healy, author of Let Them Eat Prozac, looks at the historic roots of our current "medicalized distress" in which half the population is said to suffer a mental illness at some point in life and babies are diagnosed in utero as bipolar.

Stock Photo

Although residential use of lead-based paint was banned in 1978, nearly one million children under the age of six in the U.S. have lead poisoning today. About 12.5 million houses constructed before the ban contained lead-based paint. Lead exposure can poison adults, but children are at a much higher risk.

Lead poisoning in children

Very young children have a double whammy when it comes to lead. They are more likely to get lead poisoning because they ingest their environments. They put everything in their mouths and they touch everything around them and then put their fingers in their mouths. Children exposed to lead suffer more harm than adults. Lead poisoning in children can cause:

Stock Photo

Becoming a new parent may be one of the most exciting and frightening times in someone’s life. For nine months the child was carried by the mother, plans for the near future were made, and everyone who knows the birth is inevitably close have been looking forward to hearing the news.

However, one of the last hurdles the child and parents must endure before being welcomed into the world is the actual birth. Most of the time, the birth will go just as planned. Yet there are occasions where the birth is not an occasion for joy, but of sadness and disbelief.