Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > The Troubled Teen Industry
Dexedrine for 4 year-olds
Antigen:
--- Quote ---On 2003-11-21 15:46:00, Anonymous wrote:
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Actually, the research shows that if you treat ADD early with stimulants, the chances of adolescent or adult drug abuse are at least cut by half.
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I can't buy that at all. I just know too many people who got hooked on RX speed as kids and switched to either diverted or illicit speed when the doctors decided to cut them off.
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And, the research also shows that medication is superior to medication plus behavior therapy or to therapy alone. That was from a big, multi-site study by Harvard U. researchers.
Of course, there are kids on these meds who shouldn't be on them. But try this: talk to parents whose kids are on medication. You will find a story of 1000 other things tried first before resorting to drugs and then the drugs worked better than the other stuff. Or they didn't-- but what you won't find is parents who just say "oh sure let's put my kids on drugs" and that's the first thing they do.
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Sorry, again, not at all consistent with my experience. I've seen mothers use the drugs as a threat; "If you don't behave, I'll make you take your medicine!"
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If you do find parents who thoughtlessly put their kids on drugs as first option, I'd like to know their names because I've searched for them and never found them-- despite their alleged presence in all the bewailing and bemoaning of those who demonize drugs of any kind.
And yeah, Dexedrine is exactly the same drug many speed users inject-- just as heroin is the same medication that is used for pain across the world. So what?"
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Look, I like drugs. I always have. I've tried quite a few just out of curiosity. I'm not an anti-drug zealot. But I'm not a pro-drug zealot either. There is just no way that as many young kids as are being prescribed psyche drugs can possibly be abnormal. By definition, they're the normal one just because there are so many more of them than kids who don't show these 'signs' of dysfunction.
The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's no good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
--Carl Sagan
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Antigen:
--- Quote ---On 2003-11-21 21:32:00, Anonymous wrote:
There's also no evidence to support the idea that "these drugs destroy the cardiovascular system."
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Oh, come on now! How many more prominant middle age blowskis have to keel over of heart attack? Speed is as bad for your heart as alcohol is for your liver. Reasearch is great for ferreting out the nitty, gritty details. But some things are so obvious it doesn't really take an expert.
The most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of
knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised, for the preservation of freedom and happiness.
--Thomas Jefferson
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Deborah:
Required reading for any parent who is considering medications for ADD/ADHD. One of the best I've seen- covers all the bases.
http://www.consciencedupeuple.com/Rital ... DDICTS.doc
Re: ADD and chemical imbalance
The truth is that you have a right to know that this is all an invention. Most of what you will hear is pure unfounded false "science" and is the product of the ravings of a single psychiatrists in the US who first put it out as "theory" to attract drug company funding to his university. The theory, thus funded became the basis for a multi-billion dollar industry world wide which has attracted psychiatrists, pediatricians, insurance companies, school officials and teachers, all of whom profit, along with the drug companies, all at the ultimate expense of the children.
Anonymous:
The question, ?Are we overmedicating our kids with psychiatric drugs?? was once again brought to our attention by a recent cover story in Time Magazine. I?ll answer with another question, ?How much more evidence do we need to decide something is terribly awry with our society and culture -- and especially with the way we address the behavior and performance problems of children??
Rates of psychiatric diagnosis and medication use continue to soar. An estimated five million children take Ritalin type stimulant drugs. A national survey revealed one in ten eleven year old white boys to be on Ritalin. Data on other psychiatric drugs are less available, but easily millions take Prozac type medications and hundreds of thousands are on similarly untested (for children) medications like the anti-seizure drug, Depakote or anti-psychotic, Risperdal. It?s now not uncommon to find three year olds taking Ritalin and teens on four different psychiatric drugs simultaneously.
Leaders in American child psychiatry say this increase in the use of psychiatric medication comes because of greater public awareness and improved diagnosis of children?s mental illness. They point to prevalence surveys indicating 10% of American children have a disorder. These studies confuse symptoms with impairment (how affected are these children really?) and wind up medicalizing what was once extremes of normal coping behavior. All this ?pathology? out there that needs treatment is used to justify and defend the alarming rise in meds for kids. People forget that at one time in the 1960s, using the psychiatric standards of the day, sixty per cent of people living in Manhattan were judged to be possibly mentally ill.
American psychiatry is missing the big picture. We have a major public health problem in our country and our doctors continue to focus on the individual. Before the biological revolution in psychiatry, doctors addressed the individual child?s interior world. Now it?s his brain that needs treatment. But really nothing has changed in that the larger social and cultural factors involved in generating stress and mental illness in kids are ignored.
Let me clue you in ? if you didn?t know this already. We live in a very busy very materialistic society. We have come to expect more from our children developmentally and educationally in the last twenty years than ever before. Five year olds are expected to read and every kid is expected to go to college. Discipline of children which has been eroding for decades is completely in the toilet (parents are too afraid or guilty to say ?no? and a physical intervention has you worried about Children?s Protective Services).
We have a public that has been manipulated to believe their kid has a brain disorder by the TV commercials of a drug industry. Doctors stand to be paid three times more by insurance companies to see four ?med checks? rather than one psychotherapy session. Everyone is under pressure (economic and emotional) so the ?quick fix? becomes attractive to all involved.
So what?s wrong with that. Don?t some of these drugs ?work? to relieve symptoms and the distress of children and their families? The answer is a qualified ?yes? on the short term but no one knows the long term effects and safety of most of these medications. Doctors, in their desire to help, run a great risk here of violating their Hippocratic Oath of ?First do no harm.?
But we are missing the big picture. Every day I write another psychiatric medication to ?ease the suffering? of a child. In the same way, if a child presented with dehydration from acute diarrhea I would treat that child immediately with fluids without waiting to discover the specific cause of the illness. But over time, as I saw more children with the same condition, and learned they were drinking river water possibly contaminated by a factory upstream, it would be unconscionable for me to simply treat the diarrhea without at least raising questions about the source of this contamination. American psychiatry, by ignoring the larger public health issues associated with the huge rise in psychiatric drugs for children, runs the risk of being complicitous with values and forces that are harmful to children and families. When will we have learned enough to address this bigger issue of what?s good for our kids?
Source: http://www.docdiller.com
Deborah:
http://content.health.msn.com/content/a ... /95700.htm
Preteen Ritalin May Increase Depression
Early Use of ADHD Drug Alters Brain, Rat Studies Show
By Daniel DeNoon
Reviewed By Brunilda Nazario, MD on Monday, December 08, 2003 WebMD Medical News
Dec. 8, 2003 -- Ritalin use in preteen children may lead to depression later in life, studies of rats suggest.
It's an open question whether what passes for depression in lab rats has anything to do with depression in humans. But early use of Ritalin and other stimulant drugs seems to permanently alter animals' brains. That raises concerns that the same thing might be happening in children who take these drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
The findings come from a research team led by William A. Carlezon Jr., PhD, director of the behavioral genetics laboratory at McLean Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School. The study appears in the Dec. 15 issue of Biological Psychiatry.
"Rats exposed to Ritalin as juveniles showed large increases in learned-helplessness behavior during adulthood, suggesting a tendency toward depression," Carlezon says in a news release. "These rats also showed abnormally high levels of activity in familiar environments. [This] might reflect basic alterations in the way rats pay attention to their surroundings."
Ritalin, Cocaine, and the Brain
Ritalin and cocaine have different effects on humans. But their effects on the brain are very similar. When given to preteen rats, both drugs cause long-term changes in behavior.
One of the changes seems good. Early exposure to Ritalin makes rats less responsive to the rewarding effects of cocaine. But that's not all good. It might mean that the drug short-circuits the brain's reward system. That would make it difficult to experience pleasure -- a "hallmark symptom of depression," Carlezon and colleagues note.
The other change seems all bad. Early exposure to Ritalin increases rats' depressive-like responses in a stress test.
"These experiments suggest that preadolescent exposure to [Ritalin] in rats causes numerous complex behavioral adaptations, each of which endures into adulthood," Carlezon and colleagues conclude. "This work highlights the importance of a more thorough understanding of the enduring neurobiological effects of juvenile exposure to psychotropic drugs."
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SOURCES: Carlezon, W.A. Jr. Biological Psychiatry, Dec. 15, 2003; vol 54: pp 1330-1337. News release, McLean Hospital, Belmont, Mass.
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Not to worry, there's always the other top selling psych drugs for depression. Better read up.
http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?to ... forum=9&94
[ This Message was edited by: Deborah on 2003-12-09 05:31 ]
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