How young children can you give psychiatric drugs to?

SLUSK

When is a child too young for psychiatric drugs? I'm never studied psychiatry properly so I cannot say for sure. Call me a crazy Scientologist if you want but I don't think you should put toddlers on psychiatric drugs.

In America however children less than a year old have been given psychiatric drugs.
http://www.naturalnews.com/028640_psychiatry_infants.html

"Lane asked for Dawdy's opinion on a recent report in the St Petersburg Times that found 23 infants less than one-year-old had been prescribed antipsychotics in Florida in 2007, as well as the drug overdose death of 4-year-old Rebecca Riley in Massachusetts. "How is it possible for psychiatrists to continue prescribing to infants in such numbers without more oversight?" Lane asked."

Fluffybums

My concern is that most drugs are tested in adults in clinical trials as it is perceived as being unethical to test on children, though this is changing. How these same drugs would affect a developing brain, I don't think is being examined.

SLUSK

Do you think it is meaningful to label toddlers mentally ill and put them on strong mind altering drugs?

Swampy

There was a great Louis Therou (sp?) documentary on this topic on BBC last Sunday.

macca1983

It is easy for people who are unqualified to make statements like 'we should not put labels on kids' 'we should not give drugs to kids' etc. A lot of amateur psychologists out there who think they know better than a doctor for example with 30 yrs experience.

p.pete

SLUSK wrote: »

Do you think it is meaningful to label toddlers mentally ill and put them on strong mind altering drugs?

Labelling? You've gone off topic in your own thread SLUSK!

SLUSK

What makes you think that these "experts" care about the well being of the toddlers who they prescribe mind altering drugs to?

Odysseus

SLUSK wrote: »

What makes you think that these "experts" care about the well being of the toddlers who they prescribe mind altering drugs to?

What evidence have you got that they don't?

SLUSK

Odysseus wrote: »

What evidence have you got that they don't?

Plenty of evidence that psychiatrists receive kickbacks to put people on drugs. Stories such as this one are everywhere if you bother to look. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/health/10psyche.html?pagewanted=all

Odysseus

SLUSK wrote: »

Plenty of evidence that psychiatrists receive kickbacks to put people on drugs. Stories such as this one are everywhere if you bother to look. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/health/10psyche.html?pagewanted=all

I would not call that article evidence.

macca1983

SLUSK wrote: »

What makes you think that these "experts" care about the well being of the toddlers who they prescribe mind altering drugs to?

I am referring to qualified doctors, people with 20 yrs of experience. I am not saying they are always right but i will take their opinion any day over some one who has zero qualifications and has simply read a few articles.

SLUSK

I'd rather stick to common sense. You don't give cocaine to toddlers or any other mind altering drugs. I don't blindly trust authority figures.

ToniTuddle

Medicaid records in some states show infants less than a year old on drugs for mental disorders.
The use of powerful antipsychotics with privately insured children, aged 2 through 5 in the US, doubled between 1999 and 2007, according to a study of data on more than one million children with private health insurance in the January, 2010, "Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry."

The number of children in this age group diagnosed with bipolar disorder also doubled over the last decade, Reuters reported.

How the hell can they tell if a child at the age of 2 has bipolar disorder???

As for giving drugs like that to a baby....That's plain stupid.
Everyone always tries to limit the amount of medication that kids get access to as their brains and organs are all really fragile and growing.

Makes no sense to me anyway why they would need it.

SLUSK

ToniTuddle wrote: »

How the hell can they tell if a child at the age of 2 has bipolar disorder???

As for giving drugs like that to a baby....That's plain stupid.
Everyone always tries to limit the amount of medication that kids get access to as their brains and organs are all really fragile and growing.

Makes no sense to me anyway why they would need it.

Well haven't you figured it out already? We should not question the "expertise" of these "experts" in psychiatry. If a psychiatrists tells you to "medicate" your child with heroin then who are you to question his wisdom?

ToniTuddle

SLUSK wrote: »

Well haven't you figured it out already? We should not question the "expertise" of these "experts" in psychiatry. If a psychiatrists tells you to "medicate" your child with heroin then who are you to question his wisdom?

I doubt they would ask you to throw some heroin into your childs vain.

Are these children in question...like literally banging their heads off walls, doing crazy things that will either harm themselves or hurt others? In cases like that they may need some medication to keep them calm and sedated at certain times to help them you know?

SLUSK

ToniTuddle wrote: »

I doubt they would ask you to throw some heroin into your childs vain.

Are these children in question...like literally banging their heads off walls, doing crazy things that will either harm themselves or hurt others? In cases like that they may need some medication to keep them calm and sedated at certain times to help them you know?

Yet they give anti-psychotics to children. These drugs are known to cause obesity and diabetes. Guess children have to pay with their lives because of parents who don't know how to control their kids and instead let psychiatrists drug them into submission.

ToniTuddle

SLUSK wrote: »

Yet they give anti-psychotics to children. These drugs are known to cause obesity and diabetes. Guess children have to pay with their lives because of parents who don't know how to control their kids and instead let psychiatrists drug them into submission.

It could be alot more complex than that.
Alot of parents can barely control regular kids let alone one that may have severe mental issues or brain problems that have not been detected yet.

Yeah sure Docs in some countries seem to give out medication without even blinking or thinking! But that isn't all of them.

Victor

SLUSK wrote: »

Call me a crazy Scientologist

Of course, one has to wonder about hte motivations of Scientologists in keeping mental health patients away from psychiatrists.

My brother works for an equipment manufacturer that supplies the pharmaceutical and food industries and has to keep generally up to date with this type of stuff. He mentioned that with biomedical equipment inserted into the body, e.g. a pacemaker it was difficult to compare adults with children. A typical adult getting a pacemaker in their fifties or sixties might live for another 10-20 years. Designing a pacemaker for a child mean designing something that will last a minimum of 50 and probably as many as 100 years.

Not identical, but similarly giving a child a drug means affecting how they will be for the rest of their life. Its one thing to deal with the drugs we know (and we were still giving children aspirin willy nilly 20 years ago, 100 years after it came into use), it another with the drugs we don't know.

Then there is a matter of children growing. They change and with change comes discomfort. And while fair enough treat the extreme cases, it can sometimes be counter-productive to remove all pain, because we then don't know how to deal with pain.

JuliusCaesar

Slusk,

it seems to me that you start these threads with one purpose in mind only - to decry psychology and psychiatry. You do not seem to take in rational scientific argument as your mind is made up at the start. There are AFAIK no child psychologists on this forum, and no psychologists prescribe.

You subject is something that happens in the US, and medications which are prescribed.

Go take your opinions to somebody involved and stop trolling here. You are in danger of a ban, cos I'm tired of your posts.

macca1983

SLUSK wrote: »

I'd rather stick to common sense. You don't give cocaine to toddlers or any other mind altering drugs. I don't blindly trust authority figures.

Common sense v medical qualifications? I've plenty of common sense - i doubt people will be asking for my medical opinions any time soon nor should they.

JuliusCaesar

As Voltaire said, common sense is not so common....

Valmont

From the NY times article:

"But the intersection of money and medicine, and its effect on the well-being of patients, has become one of the most contentious issues in health care. Nowhere is that more true than in psychiatry, where increasing payments to doctors have coincided with the growing use in children of a relatively new class of drugs known as atypical antipsychotics."

"From 2000 to 2005, drug maker payments to Minnesota psychiatrists rose more than sixfold, to $1.6 million. During those same years, prescriptions of antipsychotics for children in Minnesota’s Medicaid program rose more than ninefold."
Such payments could encourage psychiatrists to use drugs in ways that endanger patients’ physical health, said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, the provost of Harvard University and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. The growing use of atypicals in children is the most troubling example of this, Dr. Hyman said.

“There’s an irony that psychiatrists ask patients to have insights into themselves, but we don’t connect the wires in our own lives about how money is affecting our profession and putting our patients at risk,” he said.

Regardless of SLUSK's sentiments, I have to admit that giving psychiatric medication to "Bipolar" 5 years-olds is hugely disturbing. I know that psychologists aren't prescribing the drugs but as a parallel profession treating the same illnesses in different ways, a psychologist should be rightly worried at the growth of such trends.