this is what i am talking about

I'm posting a link to a recent episode of Frontline that is about the rise in prescriptions of psychoactive drugs for young children. Personally, it makes me livid, because there are so many examples of the wrongheaded and insane thinking that many psychologists have about how to approach the problem, like prescribing drugs that were created for adults and without testing how they will affect children, like writing the prescriptions before they have even formed a diagnosis, like forming diagnoses with a COMPLETE lack of critical thinking about what other factors may cause a symptom like "extreme irritability" instead of leaping to the conclusion that means bipolar disorder just because it's listed in the DSM, like succumbing to pressure and bribery from the drug companies to write a lot of prescriptions, etc. I am also in awe of the way these parents will blindly follow the advice of a doctor, even in situations where their child is 4 years old and every single trip to the doctor they come away with a new prescription and/or increases in the ones their child already takes. Or when they say, "Well, his preschool teacher suggested medication, she thought his acting-behavior might be due to a chemical imbalance." WHEN THE HELL DID A PRESCHOOL TEACHER BECOME QUALIFIED TO MAKE THAT SORT OF STATEMENT?!?!?!

The most terrifying aspect of this video to me is how the parents are convinced the children will have to be on drugs for the rest of their lives in order to cope with their conditions. These premature diagoses create a label for the child, not for their behavior, that becomes their identity. Telling your twelve-year-old daughter that she will have to take medication for the rest of her life because she is bipolar is a death sentence. These people don't think about or understand anything about the effects of what they put in their childrens' minds or bodies. There is one mother with a 4-year-old who is insatiably hungry as a side effect of one of his many medications. What does she feed him? Corn dogs. CORN DOGS! How about some fruit, asshole?

This is what I am going to school for. I want to be involved in research that shows how detrimental these drugs can be when used blindly, research into alternative methods for treating these problems (like, how about not one of the psychologists in the video even MENTIONS therapy as an option, as an alternative or supplement to the drugs. Guess what? Our brains are very complex and they are not in a vacuum. It's both nature AND nurture), and research that will further educate us as to how this very complex system works. The oversimplification in the way the brain is described to some of these patients is staggering. People need to be educated about what we know about how the brain works (and this knowledge has to keep increasing through research and NOT research funded and skewed by the drug companies), and they need to be educated or for crying out loud have the goddam intellectual curiosity to SEEK OUT education about what these drugs actually do before they idiotically put them in their own and in their childrens' bodies.


Here's the link:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/medicatedchild/