Drugging Our Children to Death: Part I

Drugging Our Children to Death: Part I

by Karen Hunt:

“Labeling a child, ‘mentally ill,’ is like hanging a sign around his or her neck saying, ‘GARBAGE: take it away.’ ” Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry.

Along the smoke-free lanes and carefree byways of Calabasas and far across American suburbia, a river of drugs is flowing and I am not talking illegal ones.

Not too long ago I was driving my sixteen year old son, Harry, and his best friend, Tommy, home from school, Tommy reminiscing on his short-lived encounter with Ritalin. He was twelve years old when he was prescribed Ritalin for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD.

“It was creepy,” he said. “I could totally just sit in my chair and stare at the teacher for hours and I could hear every single word, like in slow motion. That’s how it is—you can concentrate on stupid tasks but you’re not really there inside yourself. It’s as if something else is controlling you. It was horrible. I started pretending to take my pills but wouldn’t. Eventually I told my mom I didn’t want to do it anymore and she stopped it.”

 Harry said, “Didn’t those doctors think about what would happen when they dumped a ton of drugs on us? Are they really so stupid to think we’ll just ‘follow orders?’ Mostly everyone I know pretends to take their pills but sells them. It’s crazy.”  

The “War on Drugs” is alive and well in LA suburbia—but not in the way most people think. The real war is being waged by mega-drug companies, each vying to make the biggest profit in an industry worth billions with no concern for the long-term consequences on the human guinea pigs—our children. Academics determine through research funded by the drug companies that the public is suffering from these terrible mental diseases and psychiatrists, in turn, prescribe the medications developed by the drug companies. A tidy circle of profit ensues. Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer at the division of medical ethics at Harvard School of Medicine and former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine states that "… there is fairly good evidence that the research has been tainted because of the financial relationships between academic researchers and drug companies."

Powerful, highly addictive drugs are now being marketed directly to families through Stepford Wives-like TV and magazine ads, showing smiling, sedated children and their equally smiling and sedated parents happily ingesting their “medication.”

I remember overhearing one girl telling another, “I don’t wanna be an ‘ad kid.’”

I asked what she meant.

“Oh, you know, those kids who go around campus saying ‘I’m on Zoloft, I’m so happy…I’m on Zoloft, I’m so happy.’ I don’t wanna be an ad for a drug company.”

Another girl responded, “Oh yeah, I tried Zoloft. It turned everything gray. The world went gray. I was sick for two days, puking.”

Any day of the week, I can overhear jokes and comments like that. The other morning I was sitting with my fourteen year old son, Max, and two girls, eighteen year old Kashmir and fifteen year old Andrea. The topic turned to drugs. As I stated in my first essay, I am not interested in listing impersonal government statistics, I am writing about what really happens in my neighborhood. I am writing about the honest, straightforward perceptions of our youth and the ways in which they figure out their world.

I asked these kids what they thought was the biggest difference between the drug situation in Calabasas and South Central—where is it worse?

They immediately said Calabasas.

Kashmir, “You can get anything here. Everybody’s dad or mom is a doctor or a lawyer or a psychiatrist and they all have money. Prescription drugs, being mentally sick, going to therapy, it’s the new fad. So everybody’s either taking pills, selling or both. The ‘experts’ think we’re idiots. But we know how to get information on every subject on earth—we google it. We know which drugs are used for which effect and what the active ingredients are.”

She took a drag off her legal drug of choice—a cigarette (we weren’t in Calabasas, by the way, we were sitting outside a Starbucks in Woodland Hills where it’s still okay to pollute the air with tobacco) and pointed her cigarette at me sagely. “You know what scares me? Twelve year olds, they’re the scariest people on earth. I’d rather meet a Crips in Compton than a twelve year old in Calabasas. They’re so shady, little corporate monsters in the making. Oh, the “just say no” campaign? They test the potheads and expel them—in the meantime, all the nerds are zoned out of their minds—but hey, it’s okay, because it’s legal drugs.”

“So what’s going on?” I asked. “Do you think everyone needs these drugs?”

Max, “It’s a scam. They’re turning kids into zombies.” 

I thought about that for a minute and I had to agree. We are taking away moral responsibility and telling children they can’t help their behavior because they have a mental disease. An important part of growing up is learning, often most painfully, to make moral choices. Puberty is an agonizing time with hormones constantly triggering confusing reversals in emotions. I remember falling in and out of love, wanting to die one day and feeling euphoric the next. I fainted if the doctor gave me a shot. If I heard about a disease, I thought I had it. When the dentist told me that my bottom jaw was growing too fast and I needed braces, I couldn’t sleep at night because I literally believed that I’d wake up in the morning and find my jaw sticking out across the room. I had to learn how to control my wild emotions, as well as my over-active imagination, not give up on even trying. The whole concept of Free Will and Moral Choice is being thrown out the window and replaced by a mind-numbing passivity. Pain, sadness, anger, resentment, jealousy, these are all normal emotions that teenagers—and adults—should expect to feel. We don’t need to be “happy” all the time.

The image of Jesus, if he were walking amongst us today, exhorting the parents of ill-behaved, depressed or over-active children to medicate them into submission is absurd. Rather he would be railing against the greed and dishonesty of the psychiatrists and the drug companies and blasting indulgent and uninvolved parents for making excuses and not setting an example that kids can respect and follow.

Kashmir, “Like, this is what you do. You go to your therapist and fake something (because everyone who’s rich has a therapist, right?). Like Brandon, he’s a fake. He got grounded for two months. His parents were gonna send him away, have someone come in the night and drag him out and put him in one of those Nazi concentration camps in the middle of Utah or somewhere where they can do whatever they want to you without any regulations. So, Brandon said he was hearing voices telling him to kill people. That got his parents attention. They sent him to a psychologist. He told the doc, I got something against the number 3. The doc said, what do you mean? He said, well, see that filing cabinet there? I’ve been looking at it for the past twenty minutes and it has three folders in it. It’s making me nervous. End result—Brandon got put on medication and he’s been selling it ever since.”    

Andrea, “I don’t fake my problems. I take Wellbutrin for depression and Trazodone for anxiety and anger. I’ve been hospitalized twice—once I tried to commit suicide. I saved up and took 23 pills at once. They said when they got to me that I was two minutes away from being dead.”

As I write this essay, I just looked up the official Wellbutrin site on the internet and it warns that it is “approved only for adults 18 years and over. In some children, teens, and young adults, antidepressants increase suicidal thoughts or actions.” Andrea, as I said, is fifteen.

“So what do you think of the meds?” I asked.

“I hate it. I feel like a rat in a cage, an experiment. They put me on something and then, if it doesn’t work, they put me on something else. They don’t know what they’re doing. I feel like other people are controlling me and I can never learn to control myself. My adoptive mom had her leg amputated last year and my dad has hepatitis C, so you can’t say I don’t have issues. You can see I’m overweight—hello! I get made fun of. Kids throw food at me; I can’t describe how bad every day of my life is at school. I got anger issues—I don’t need to be an expert to figure that out. But nobody helps me deal with it. They just put me on meds.”

I couldn’t help but contrast Andrea’s mental illness with her father’s physical one. Objective criteria were used to determine that he had Hepatitis C and a drug prescribed to ease the condition. However, there are no objective criteria determining whether or not Andrea has a mental illness. I quote Thomas Szazs here, as I am unabashedly a big fan of his, “it is not reasonable to ask whether an antipsychotic drug, say Zyprexa, is effective against schizophrenia, because there are no objective criteria to determine whether a person has or does not have this alleged disorder. This is why it is futile to debate whether one or another psychotropic drug ‘works.’”

What are all these medications that are being given to our children and what are the behaviors indicating that a child needs them? A November 16, 2008 article in the Los Angeles Times by Christopher Lane titled “Wrangling over psychiatry’s bible,” talks about the unchecked power of the American Psychiatric Assn. to secretly convene without any oversight and create new mental illnesses, which people can then be told are valid diseases that they are suffering from, requiring medication. Some of the new ones up for inclusion in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders” are “Apathy Disorder,” “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” “Compulsive Buying Disorder, “Internet Addiction,” and “Relational Disorder.” Where is the end of this?

Mostly, our children are being diagnosed with ADHD. I will interject two statistics here, because they are so telling: The number of children, in America because this disease has yet to hit it big in other countries, ages 15 to 19 taking medication for ADHD has increased by 311 percent over 15 years. The use of medication to treat children between the ages of 5 and 14 also increased by approximately 170 percent. (www.education-world.com)

So really, what is ADHD? In the second part of this essay, I will explore the history of how this form of “mental straight jacketing” came about and give you a classic description of an ADHD boy. Just reading it is enough to send shivers of dread down any parent’s spine and send them running for the medicine cabinet…

to be continued

Click Here to read Part 2 of this essay