A perfect storm

There’s a “perfect storm” hailing little colored pills down on America’s kids with the force of bullets.

As a clinical psychologist, I’ve been forecasting it for years, and now I’m issuing a warning to America’s parents that it’s here. This “perfect storm” was formed by the convergence of three “fronts”:

1. Insidious mass-marketing of often-unnecessary, often-dangerous psychiatric medications for use on children, often citing junk science bought and paid for by the makers and marketers of the drugs

2. A cultural preference for “quick fixes” that translates into pediatricians and family physicians, often inadequately trained in mental-health diagnosis and treatment, who are nonetheless eager to accommodate parental preferences for pills instead of parenting, or as I call it, “medicating instead of dedicating,” and

3. “Mental health parity,” a well-intentioned but deeply-flawed piece of legislation attached to last year’s economic bailout bill that will make both psychiatric drugs and the physicians who dispense them more accessible than ever to the parents of difficult-but-not-diseased kids.

Consider this: An estimated 2.5 million American kids are on various medications for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD, which in my opinion, is a misdiagnosis in the vast majority of cases, made by pediatricians and family practice doctors who don’t even own the official “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” or DSM, and base their diagnoses largely on anecdotal parental reports of rambunctious behavior.

I’ve seen many kids who’ve carried ADHD diagnoses, and I’d (conservatively) estimate that less than 5 percent of them really have had problems with brain functioning. Most of them have been lazy academically and had poor impulse control mainly because of lackadaisical and detached parenting, yet they’ve been medicated. Why? Because their parents prefer to think that their problems stem from brain deficits rather than parenting deficits and prefer solutions that involve pills rather than parenting.

If you ever get a hold of a DSM (currently the fourth edition, text revision) and look up what it takes to warrant a diagnosis of ADHD, you’ll see what I mean. A proper diagnosis of ADHD requires more than anecdotes. By my read, it requires firsthand evidence from multiple sources (e.g. parents, teachers and psychological testing) of inability, not simply refusal, to focus attention, over time, across multiple settings.

But even when rendered properly, the diagnosis and accompanying medications are still far too easy to get in my opinion. If a kid can watch an entire movie or sporting event or play a video game for hours on end, then it’s apparent to me that his or her brain is able to focus, and I think the diagnosis should be ruled out at that point.

Why is an exacting diagnosis so critical? First and foremost, kids have died from heart attacks attributable to ADHD medications, enough times that the American Heart Association now recommends that every kid undergo a cardiac exam before taking these drugs. Do you think that’s happening? I don’t either. And why should it? After all, a prominent psychiatrist paid by the drug makers thinks the Heart Association’s recommendation is overkill.

The same drugs have also been found to make some kids psychotic, causing them to experience schizophrenia-like symptoms including visual, auditory and tactile hallucinations. And those are just two of the major potential side effects that we know of, not to mention what it does to a kid psychologically to be told that there’s something wrong with his or her brain when there isn’t! (And by the way, selling unneeded ADHD meds to others for “recreational” use is now a rampant crime on American high school and college campuses.)

Now consider this: There’s an insidious movement afoot to make “Pediatric Bipolar Disorder” the next ADHD, and this one, if successful, could be even more dangerous. Traditionally, Bipolar Disorder, characterized by extremes of mood, has been a diagnosis given only to post-adolescent patients because of the difficulty in distinguishing mood swings induced by normal adolescent hormonal fluctuations from bipolar mood swings.

Well, believe it or not, the companies that make medications for Bipolar Disorder think it should be diagnosed (and, of course, medicated!) in adolescents and children as well as in adults, and they’ve recently commissioned “studies” that just so happen to recommend early diagnosis.

Some funny things have happened on the way to the presses with such “studies,” like ghost-writers penning reports ostensibly authored by doctors, like three prominent Harvard psychiatrists apparently hiding more than $1 million each in pharmaceutical company funding, like a similar case involving a prominent psychiatrist at Emory University, and like a similar case involving a psychiatrist and former host of a mental-health show on National Public Radio who was among the nation’s most vocal advocates of diagnosing and medicating Bipolar Disorder in children and teens.

Medications commonly prescribed for Bipolar Disorder (mood-stabilizing anti-convulsants and powerful anti-psychotics) have been strongly linked to everything from suicide to sudden heart attacks (particularly in children and the elderly) to tardive dyskinesia (chronic, pronounced and often-irreversible muscle spasms, primarily in the facial region). Just what America’s kids need – especially, once again, if they don’t even really have the disorder!

Sadly, it’s not just ADHD and Bipolar Disorder. Pharmaceutical companies and the shills who conduct their “studies” also are pushing drugs for anxiety and other psychiatric conditions on kids just as mental health parity is likely to put more kids in the offices of more doctors who will cater to more parents seeking “quick fixes” for more problems.

The FDA and state medical licensing boards should be doing more, but there’s so much money in pharmaceuticals that, as an attorney, I think the only hope of stopping this “perfect storm” from strengthening to catastrophic proportions are some very big jury verdicts – of the magnitudes we’ve seen heretofore only in cigarette cases. Unfortunately, we lawyers get big verdicts only after there’s been big damage, so please, if you’re a parent, heed my warning, and do everything you can to shelter your kids from this deluge of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs.

 

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