Oh Jesus!

[athenaltena]

Watching a documentary about diagnosing kids with mental disorders and how they're medicated, and saying "Jesus!" every other minute. One kid was on 8 different medicines by the time he was 10, and most of those were to treat the side effects of other medicine! And there's been a 4000 percent increase in bipolar diagnoses in just over a decade!

Did no one ever say "Stop, what are we doing here?" Apparently not! And of course there was the fiasco with anti-depressants a few years ago and the fact that kids were, you know, killing themselves because they were on this stuff and nobody waited to see what would happen before they started mass prescribing it! No one studied it, no one said "Stop!" They have doctors who literally admit that they do not know what they are doing, just trying a random combination to see if it works! No!

*repeated headdesk* It's disgraceful. Now I'm not going to rail about how medication is evil because they do a lot of good for people who couldn't function otherwise, but these are kids and they flat out do not know what the long term affects are of piling these onto kids, whose brains are not yet developed! They are not adults, they cannot fully conceptualize what this means, these things are given to them rather than giving them therapy and because it's cheaper, it is irresponsible and it is not good medicine! What is going to happen to these kids in 20 years? They don't know! That's bad medicine! And half of the "symptoms" are just regular kid behavior, seriously, temper tantrums are enough to get these kids on medication with the way they dole out the meds! That's medicalizing behavior that really isn't an issue and framing it as a problem, and the risks are way way too high!

What was especially distressing is how they showed videos of this one kid at different ages, and once they piled the medication onto him the life just drained out of his face. Something is wrong here, and though they haven't said it yet I'm willing to bet that something bad happened to the kid.

Jesus Christ, stop and think, people!

Comments

[aureantes.livejournal.com]

What most people don't seem to grasp is that the natural mental state for a child - or adolescent for that matter - IS to be moody and have wide lability of emotional affect. What in adults is generally called bipolarity is completely normal as a condition of childhood - things do affect one deeply, reactions may be great to seemingly small things - but that is the way that any person of even moderate adult sensitivity begins in self-awareness, and to label it as pathological in the young is to penalize sensitivity itself for not fitting into an adult mould.

I'm sure if I had been born 20 years later than I was, my parents would have been pressured to put me on medication when I was in preschool or first grade because of the tantrums I had, and I would certainly have been diagnosed w/ Aspergers, ADD and bipolarity or clinical depression. But the same could be said of many creative (esp. Romantic) figures from previous generations. Emotional support and intellectual contact with people I could talk to are what I actually needed, and what sensitive+creative psyches thrive on, but who actually thinks of that as an official option these days? Kids are overmedicated for the convenience and cost-effectiveness of overburdened school systems, as well as to fit the convenience of parents who are culturally discouraged from enforcing their wills by means of physical violence, threats of hellfire & brimstone, or other arbitrarily authoritarian means (cf, Alice Miller's excellent study For Your Own Good). It's a pity and a resurgent crime that juvenile psychotherapy is considered a hypercerebral luxury and a waste of time unless it leads to medication and/or enforcement of adult behavioural demands upon the child/teen in question.

[athenaltena.livejournal.com]

That's what I meant by medicalization of normal childhood behavior. It's almost like it's a throwback to the Victorian Age where kids were expected to act like little adults. It's sad.

[kawakiisakazuki.livejournal.com]

It's not just stupidity and lack of thinking, parents and schools *want* behavior to be medicalized because that absolves them of all responsibility to deal with it in any way :(

[athenaltena.livejournal.com]

Yeah, which is why it's troubling that the medical model is being applied to so many things these days that really do not need it. My rant about that drug that gives you only 4 periods a month from a while ago is another example. In my book, "convenience" is NOT a good reason to fuck with nature and put anyone on a drug that they don't know the full effects of. One thing humans seem to be bad at is grasping the concept that in many cases it's best to just LEAVE IT ALONE. We can probably trace around 90% of our modern problems back to that.

In this case it's bad enough when adults do it to themselves and these drug companies hide dangerous side effects from their customers, but I get downright angry when they do it to kids when there are betters ways that don't involve fucking around with the way their brains work.