A few years ago, when I taught a philosophy class as an adjunct for a community college, I found that my students’ opinion overwhelmingly was that kids are being overmedicated these days. Now comes news that children covered by Medicaid are far more likely to be prescribed powerful antipsychotic drugs than those covered by private insurance.
One doctor related the story of a 15-year-old girl, diagnosed as bipolar, who stopped taking her medication. “I can control my moods,” she insisted. The girl, a good student, suffered from insomnia, and had quarreled with her mother and stepfather — but the doctor found that she was not bipolar. “Normal teenager. No scrips for you,” he concluded.
The circumstances in Medicaid households may lead to a disproportionate incidence of mental illness, but reporter Duff Wilson of the New York Times asks: “Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?”
The medications in question are approved for schizophrenia, autism and bipolar disorder, but they are also prescribed for ADHD and such “so-called conduct disorders” as aggression and defiance….
Presidential candidate Barack Obama, three weeks before the 2008 election, pledged to end child under United States by 2015. Achievement of this goal has been thwarted by the recession, Amy Goldstein reports from Philadelphia for the Washington Post.
Goldstein: “Even when children are not hungry, studies have found that slight shortages of food in their homes are associated with serious problems. Babies and toddlers in those homes are far more likely to be hospitalized than children in families with similar incomes but adequate food. School-age children tend to learn and grow more slowly, and to get into trouble more often. Teenage girls are more prone to be depressed or even flirt with thoughts of suicide.”
For the foreseeable future, there is little chance of addressing a situation such as this by means of “big-government” programs. Among the constituencies whose votes and support would be needed, many would be viscerally opposed. I suppose they think such things would ruin the country. I wonder, however, how many are being ruined by the absence of such things. People do not necessarily become better able to provide for themselves when they remain in such circumstances. Won’t this weaken the country?
I am inclined to say that, compared to other countries, we are not doing right by our people — but in these times such moralizing sentiments get thrown back in your face, more often than not….
Data on nutrition and its relation to child development in a sidebar here.
According to a USDA report, almost one out of four American children struggle to get enough to eat. “This is unthinkable. It’s like we are living in a Third World country,” says a representative of Feeding America (formerly known as America’s Second Harvest).