To Use or Not to Use Antipsychotic Drugs on Children

My friend Ruthie is getting her PhD in couples and family therapy, which is great because (A): she is super smart and hard-working, and (B): she shares her readings with me, so I don't have to go to the trouble of hunting down the latest research myself!

So, this recent article she shared piqued my interest because many families struggle with the question of whether to medicate a young child who has violent outbursts.

I've seen it both ways. Some kids are really helped by medication, but ONLY IF they are properly diagnosed and treated. Others are mis-diagnosed and over-medicated. By the time they reach 13 or 14 years-old, they realize they've been mistreated and are really, really angry and distrustful of the health system and the adults around them. And either way, it still leaves open the question of what the long-term effects are of antipsychotics on young children. We just don't have the long-term case studies to know with certainty what the outcome will be.

Kyle's family's story illustrates that when family's like his are given counseling and other social supports, children's behavior changes. And at least with counseling, we know there are no long-term biological effects. Long-term social-emotional effects, yes indeed, but physiological harm: no way!

Parents Have a Role in Helping Kids who are Affected by ADHD or Mood Disorders

I was encouraged to read a recent article in the New York Times that psychologists and psychiatrists are finally getting on board with what family therapists have been advancing for years; namely, parents and other support people have an incredible amount of influence on helping children mitigate symptoms related to ADHD or mood disorders such as depression or bipolar disorder. Also encouraging to me was hearing these "experts" acknowledge that the drugs that are prescribed to young children often have deleterious side effects; since the FDA does not allow clinical trials to be conducted on children, nothing is known about the long-term effects of taking these drugs starting in childhood. As someone who neither can nor wishes to prescribe drugs to children, I was heartened to read how the work I've done with families for years with--by these families' own reports--a satisfactory degree of success is finally gaining traction in more traditional psychological fields of work. The field of psychology has done a grave disservice to parents by besmirching parental influence on children (chiefly, blaming mothers for children's problems) and is finally rectifying its past by promoting children's health through the healing power of good parenting practices. Yet again, here is more evidence from the "well, duh!" field of "modern" medicine that the problem is the problem--not children, nor the parents who care for them.