On how, with a lack of psychological services for youth to refer to Doctors increasingly “treat” behavioural problems with drugs that are not approved for kids.

Powerful antipsychotic medications with difficult and devastating  long term side effects in adults are now being routinely used to medicate behavioural problems in youth and children :”attention defecit hyperactivity disorder”, “autism”, “conduct disorder”, “anxiety”, “sleep disorder” – non of which they have been approved for.

This epidemic is iatrogenic

This is exactly the same story that Robert Whitaker tells in Anatomy of an Epidemic and that Dr Gabor Mate tells of in his work.

Extract

Jennifer Storbo lives with the effects of her unbearable choice every day.

Her son, who has non-verbal learning disabilities and Asperger’s syndrome, also suffers from depression and anxiety so debilitating he rarely leaves the house.

The one drug that helped breathe life into Connor again, a powerful antipsychotic, came at a terrible price. He gained 75 pounds in a matter of months and was unable to produce testosterone properly, problems Ms. Storbo is convinced are the result of taking risperidone.

She had to make a decision between alleviating her son’s psychological torments or setting him up for a lifetime of high blood pressure, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and other serious conditions linked to excessive weight gain.

“Talk about being between a rock and a hard place,” Ms. Storbo says from her family’s home in Port Moody, B.C. “Parenting isn’t supposed to be this hard.”

While wrenching, it turns out Connor’s story isn’t all that rare.

Children and teenagers across the country are caught in a terrible bind between needing the stabilizing response antipsychotic drugs provide and suffering the devastating side effects they can exact.

And if you think it isn’t happening, or only in America – read the article – it’s here, it’s in Toronto, in your neighbourhood – it might even be in your family.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/

Anatomy of an Epidemic

How increasing use of antidepressants leads to increasing diagnosis of mania and psychosis leads to increasing use of antipsychtics leads to increasing disability due to “mental illness” diagnoses. And how even if you don’t care about how this devastates lives, is bankrupting healthcare budgets.

Dr Gabor Mate

Is a physician and author, and a “walking compedium of ailments and disorders” – talks of of the society we have created leads us into a spiral of stress, not coping well, lack of support for families leads to stressed parenting, stress on students in school, chronic illnesses and diagnosable mental disorders. and if we don’t have a isease explanation we invent new ones- til every form of cting out is diagnosable and needs to be treated with new drugs – the same drugs talked about by Whitaker and in this Globe article. Our too narrow, incomplete bio-bio-bio understanding is one of the root causes of this vicious cycle of individual, family, societal decline as we turn inward on ourselves and lose connectedness with each other.

We can change – it starts with a broader bio-psycho-social understanding-of where this pattern comes from – and compassion and  connecting with our kids.

Dr Mate is coming to Toronto in April. Check out the link below.

Robert Whitaker – Anatomy of an Epidemic

videos

• Robert Whitaker – Anatomy of An Epidemic – videos

articles

• part 1  https://recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/robert-whitaker-natomy-of-an-epidemic/
• part 2  networktoronto.wordpress.com/category/anatomy-of-an-epidemic-2/

Dr Gabor Mate

• Dr Gabor Mate coming to Toronto – April2012 https://recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/dr-gabor-mate-coming-to-toronto/

Related articles

• Joanna Moncrief – Changing the balance of psychosis treatment (recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com)
• Antipsychotic drugs may increase diabetes in kids (parentcentral.ca)
• How antipsychotic medications cause metabolic side effects such as obesity and diabetes (medicalxpress.com)
• Antipsychotic Drugs Tied to Diabetes Risk in Kids (nlm.nih.gov)
• Number of Canadian kids offered antipsychotics more than doubles (vancouversun.com)
• Prescriptions of second-generation antipsychotics on the rise (canada.com)
• Managing Aggression in Autistic Children (everydayhealth.com)
• Zyprexa: An American psychosis (beyondmeds.com)https://recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/dr-joanna-moncrief-the-myth-of-the-chemical-cure/