The Big Answer

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Young children and even infants are being wrongly prescribed dangerous antipsychotics

Young children and even infants are being wrongly prescribed dangerous antipsychotics for the convenience of parents, doctors, schools, and daycare centers. They are being turned into zombies, which seems to be reversed once the medications are stopped, but who can say what brain damage has occurred by then, or what developmental damage to their bodies or psyches? There are huge smiles on the faces of Big Pharma (antipsychotics are the nation’s top-selling class of drugs, by revenue, with $14.6 billion in 2009), but the kids have no smiles on their faces—in fact, few expressions at all. The psychotherapy the kids need is usually not given, since strong, inappropriate drugs are simply a cheaper response to perceived aberrant behavior than psychotherapy, and many of the families are low-income.

Kids are being turned into zombies to increase Big Pharma's profits

Wilson's article is clearly an attempt to stem some of this thinly disguised child abuse in the service of expediancy and Big Pharma profits. The fact that it is legal for doctors to prescribe these drugs to tiny children even though they are not safe for them is a national tragedy proving how little power child advocates have in the U.S. and how much power Big Pharma has. The article highlights a child whose mother admits to being unready for kids, and whose parenting was quite inadequate. So the child had lots of symptoms—how could he not—and yet all those involved had the unmitigated gall to infer that the child was the problem.

Young children and even infants are being wrongly prescribed dangerous antipsychotics for the convenience of parents, doctors, schools, and daycare centers

Had the mother refrained from having kids until she was ready (if ever), the problem could have been avoided. Had the doctors involved not let themselves be brainwashed by Big Pharma's mammoth marketing campaigns, they could have shown better judgment. Has the doctors demonstrated that they had actually learned something in the psychology and/or parenting courses they had in college, they would have avoided reaching for pill bottles—the quick, ugly "fix." And, of course, it was anything BUT a fix!

Kids need better nurturing, not pills

All of this points to one of the big weaknesses of having a nation ruled by a corporatocracy in which govenment gets its orders from big corporations: the end result is that profits become more important than children's welfare and safety. This is the definition of immorality, as many of the other articles on this website have already pointed out: Who Will Tell The People?: The Betrayal Of American Democracy, Supercapitalism, and A Dream Deferred, just to name a few.

The psychiatric experts say they are finding increasingly worrisome this drugging of children, since psychotherapy is clearly a better choice, most of the time. But it costs more, relies on doctors having the integrity to act in the best interests of the child and family regardless of their, or Big Pharma's, profits, and assumes that doctors are informed and educated enough to recognize when a kid needs better caregivers, more caregiver choices, competant social work help for his family, or parenting training, or whether the child and/or the parent need serious psychotherapy. Are we really willing to sacrifice our kids on the altar of corporate profits or doctor convenience?

Kid's brain getting fried for Big Pharma's profits

Big Pharma spreading "good health via medicine" across the land

Another inconvenient truth here is that children around two years old are supposed to have tantrums—it is normal and natural and parents define it as a problem of the child when in actual fact it is merely a problem of inconvenience to the parents. See Tears and Tantrums. Defining it as bad or misbehavior or a symptom of a psychological problem is stark raving stupidity, often originating from fundamentalist religions who take tantrums as willful disobedience or proof that kids are full of sin and evil. In actual fact, tantrums are the exact opposite of psychological problems. They are, it turns out, psychological solutions. To understand this, see Tears and Tantrums.

Defining 2-year-olds' tantrums as bad, misbehavior, or a symptom of a psychological problem is stark raving stupidity—they're not 'problems,' they're solutions!