Antipsychotics being prescribed for babies and toddlers

It is a disturbing trend, and apparently quite trendy in Florida, for doctors (pediatricians in particular) to prescribe antipsychotic medication to children under the age of five. Some of those children are age zero, which of course means that they are infants.

However, there is no proof that psychosis can be diagnosed at all in children that young, and the drugs in question have never been approved for usage in children, much less very young children. Even cold medications have been withdrawn from distribution for children that young, so what on earth makes anyone believe they should be given something so dangerous? The only approved usage of any of these drugs (Risperdal) in children is to treat aggressiveness in autistic children.

Are there 19,000 autistic children under the age of five in that state, who are so aggressive that they must be medicated? No, of course not. Instead, pediatricians are prescribing these potent and extremely dangerous medications to children because they have have been diagnosed with ADHD.

Show me one healthy child between birth and the age of five who doesn’t have a short attention span and who isn’t overactive. That child does not exist, because it’s part of being that age, it’s normal. Should all children therefore be given antipsychotics? No, of course not. So, why are these doctors prescribing undeniably dangerous medications to children who are acting normally for their age?

Antipsychotics are major tranquilizers (Valium and other drugs generally referred to as tranquilizers are actually minor tranquilizers). While originally developed as an anesthetic for surgical procedures, they are now given to people with the most severe mental illnesses, those who have trouble differentiating reality from fantasy. Examples of psychotic disorders include schizophrenia, mania, and delusional disorder.

It would therefore mean that doctors are taking normal childhood imagination and interpreting it as a mental illness requiring the most potent psychiatric medications; in some cases, they may be misdiagnosing these children, because legitimately strange behavior in children is almost always caused by seizures.

If we assume that these children were screened for a seizure disorder and tested negative, it goes to follow that we are forced to imagine that there are 19,000 children under the age of five in Florida who are constantly finger painting depictions of knife-wielding maniacs and other gory scenes, or attacking others with weapons, with the intent of killing them. Anything else would fall well within the bounds of normalcy for that age (including talking to people who aren’t there - in adults that is called psychosis; in a child, it is normal, and is called “imaginary friends), and we certainly do not need to give very young children any drug originally developed as an adult surgical anesthetic.

It is also important to note (this part is not surprising) that pediatricians and family doctors are not trained to properly diagnose psychiatric disorders, and therefore are not qualified to treat psychiatric disorders. If a child has a suspected psychiatric disorder, they should be seen by a psychiatrist or a psychologist who is specifically trained in treating young children, and not just medicated and sent on their merry way to live out their childhood unable to function normally due to being given major tranquilizers on a regular daily basis intended only to control their behavior.

I very strongly suspect that, with the exception of a handful of children who actually do have autism with aggressive features, doctors prescribe these drugs to low-income children whose parents complain and worry incessantly about their children’s normal behavior. Some of those parents simply can’t deal with an overactive toddler, and some of them make up things in order to run a scam to collect disability checks for their children. Some of these parents undoubtedly have Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy. There are a lot of very sick parents in this country who intentionally harm their children for personal gain, after all. No reasonable parent would ever agree to giving their children a drug which isn’t even approved for children, and which causes serious and many times life-threatening side effects even in adults, when the only reason for prescribing it is to control behavior.

What I fear the most is that we are creating a generation of children who cannot develop normally because they were heavily tranquilized for the convenience of adults. Who knows what the constant administration of a major tranquilizer will do to the brains of those children, because there are no studies into their safety for children. However, since antipsychotics directly impact brain chemistry, I cannot imagine that it does not have serious longterm negative effects on those children and their ability to think and reason. It might actually be damaging their young developing brains, as well as their bodies. And that scares the living hell out of me.

Antipsychotics are by far the most dangerous psychotropic drugs available. While they do have legitimate uses, none of those legitimate uses (with the exception of the one already discussed) involve children who aren’t even old enough to attend school. So while I normally advocate that the government not become involved in the doctor/patient relationship, I think the DEA needs urgently to launch an investigation into this practice, and take measures to stop it. Any doctor who is not a licensed and board-certified child psychiatrist, and who is prescribing antipsychotics for children that young, should be prosecuted for child abuse and have their license to practice medicine permanently revoked.

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Source: Very Young Children Being Prescribed Antipsychotics in Florida by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.