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California Approves Laws To Cut Use Of Antipsychotics In Foster Care

October 9, 2015 By Editor

Efforts to protect children in foster care from being inappropriately medicated with powerful antipsychotic drugs got a big boost forward on Tuesday, when California Gov. Jerry Brown signed three bills into law designed to reform prescribing.

Overprescribing of psychiatric meds for foster youth is a persistent problem nationwide, with children given the drugs at double or triple the rate of those not in foster care.

In 2011, the federal Government Accounting Office found nearly 1 in 4 children in foster care was taking psychotropic medications, which include antipsychotics, antidepressants, mood stabilizers and stimulants.

Source: California Approves Laws To Cut Use Of Antipsychotics In Foster Care

Filed Under: Child Drugging, Texas Children News Tagged With: antipsychotic drugs, drugging children, texas foster children

California Moves To Stop Misuse Of Psychiatric Meds In Foster Care

September 3, 2015 By Editor

By the time DeAngelo Cortijo was 14, he had been in more than a dozen foster homes. He had run away and lived on the streets for months, and he had been diagnosed with bipolar and anxiety disorders, attachment disorder, intermittent explosive disorder or posttraumatic stress disorder. He had been in and out of mental hospitals and heavily medicated.

Cortijo, who was born in San Francisco, was taken from his mother after she attempted suicide when he was 3.

After his later diagnoses, he was prescribed a combination of antipsychotics, antidepressants and stimulants, and was told that taking them was his only hope of being normal. Instead, he said, medication made him feel “doped up and completely lost.”

Source: California Moves To Stop Misuse Of Psychiatric Meds In Foster Care

Filed Under: Child Drugging, Drugging Medicaid Children Resources, Texas Children News Tagged With: antipsychotic drugs, child abuse, drugging children, texas foster children

Feds Pay for Drug Fraud: 92 Percent of Foster Care, Poor Kids Prescribed Antipsychotics Get Them for Unaccepted Uses 

April 30, 2015 By Editor

The release in late March of an alarming new report by federal investigators has confirmed in shocking new detail what has been known for years: Poor and foster care kids covered by Medicaid are being prescribed too many dangerous antipsychotic drugs at young ages for far too long — mostly without any medical justification at all. The report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General examined in depth nearly 700 claims filed in 2011 in five of the biggest prescribing states — California, Florida, Illinois, Texas and New York — and discovered that two thirds of all the prescribing with these popular and costly “second generation antipsychotics” (SGAs) raised high-risk “quality of care” concerns.

Source: Feds Pay for Drug Fraud: 92 Percent of Foster Care, Poor Kids Prescribed Antipsychotics Get Them for Unaccepted Uses | Art Levine

Filed Under: Child Drugging, Texas Children News Tagged With: antipsychotic drugs, drugging children, texas foster children

Psychiatric Drugs Side Effects

November 1, 2011 By CCHR Texas

Psychiatric Drugs Side Effects

Common and well-documented side effects of psychiatric drugs include mania, psychosis, hallucinations, depersonalization, suicidal ideation, heart attack, stroke and sudden death.  And that is a very partial list of the side effects documented by international drug regulatory agencies the world over.

Despite a tremendous amount of information available about psychiatric drugs and their adverse effects, the data has not been easily accessible or understandable to the general public.  It is for this reason that CCHR is providing you with information that is not easily available, but is documented.  So you can find the risks for yourself, your friends and family.

 

For more information click here…

Filed Under: Issues

Parental Consent Act 2011 Will Protect Children and Parents

September 7, 2011 By CCHR Texas

Representative Ron Paul (R., Texas) recently reintroduced legislation that would keep federal funding from being used to establish or implement any universal or mandatory mental health, psychiatric, or socio-emotional screening program without Parental Consent. Because of the generality of mental health tests, it’s easy for widespread screening to lead to mass labeling, drugging and life-long stigmatization. Parents may even be subjected to punitive measures for refusing drug treatment for their children.

The most recent – and widely publicized – case was that of Maryanne Goldboldo, who police arrested after they invaded her home. They arrived with a Child Protective Services worker who came to take Goldboldo’s daughter after the woman stopped the girl’s psychotropic drug treatment. Godboldo was accused of neglecting her daughter by discontinuing her medication, but had all charges against her dropped in court last week, with the judge ruling that the court order to remove her child was not valid.

“Mental health screening programs, consensual or not, put children and their families at risk,” said Lee Spiller, Director of Investigations for Citizens Commission on Human Rights-Texas. “As Ms. Goldboldo’s case shows, a label results in stigma, it results in law enforcement and child welfare trying to force the parent to drug the child. Unfortunately we’ve seen this on a local basis as well.”

In a speech given to the House of Representatives regarding his bill, Ron Paul said, “Many children have suffered harmful side effects from using psychotropic drugs. Some of the possible side effects include mania, violence, dependence and weight gain. Yet, parents are already being threatened with child abuse charges if they resist efforts to drug their children. Imagine how much easier it will be to drug children against their parents’ wishes if a federally-funded mental-health screener makes the recommendation.”

 

Filed Under: Mental Health Screening

Conflicts of Interest

May 3, 2011 By CCHR Texas

The Corrupt Alliance of the Psychiatric-Pharmaceutical Industry

Psychiatric conflicts of interestIn March 2009, the American Psychiatric Association announced that it would phase out pharmaceutical funding of continuing medical education seminars and meals at its conventions.  However, the decision came only after years of controversial exposure of its conflict of interest with the pharmaceutical industry and the U.S. Senate Finance Committee requesting in July 2008 that the APA provide accounts for all of its pharmaceutical funding.  Despite its announcement, within two months, the APA accepted more than $1.7 million in pharmaceutical company funds for its annual conference, held in San Francisco.

Not surprising.  In 2002, the APA’s Anand Pandya said that without pharmaceutical industry funds, membership dues could escalate 455% from $540 a year to $3,000. Pandya is president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), which in 2009 was also asked to provide records of its pharmaceutical company funding to federal investigators.  About 56% of its $12 million-a-year income comes from drug makers (more below).

Within a month of the APA’s announcement, its conflicts came under criticism again with the release of a study that found that 18 of the 20 members overseeing the revision of clinical guidelines for treating just three “mental disorders” had financial ties to drug companies. The common diagnoses generate some $25 billion a year in pharmaceutical sales.

Psychiatrists Top the List of Drug Maker Gifts

In June 2007, The New York Times reported that psychiatrists in Vermont and Minnesota topped the list of doctors receiving pharmaceutical company gifts and that this financial relationship corresponds to the “growing use of atypicals [new antipsychotics] in children.” From 2000 to 2005, drug maker payments to Minnesota psychiatrists rose more than six-fold to $1.6 million.  During those same years, prescriptions of antipsychotics for children under the state’s insurance program rose more than nine-fold.

Conflicts Under Congressional Investigation

With the U.S. prescribing antipsychotics to children and adolescents at a rate six times greater than the U.K., and with 30 million Americans having taken antidepressants for a “chemical imbalance” that psychiatrists admit is a pharmaceutical marketing campaign, not scientific fact, it is no wonder that the conflict of interest between psychiatry and Big Pharma is under congressional investigation.  The following is a summary of some of those under Senate Finance Committee investigation:


Joseph BiedermanJoseph Biederman: Chief of the Program in Pediatric Psychopharmacology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Biederman has received research funds from 15 pharmaceutical companies. The New York Times exposed how Biederman earned $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers between 2000 and 2007 but did not report all of this income to Harvard University officials. His marketing of the theory that children have “bipolar” was attributed to the increase in antipsychotic drug sales for pediatric use in the United States—today 2.5 million children. Following exposure of his conflicts, he stepped down from a number of industry-funded clinical trials. In March 2009, in newly released court documents, Biederman was reported to have promised drug maker Johnson & Johnson in advance that his studies on the antipsychotic drug Risperidone would prove the drug to be effective when used on preschool age children.


Melissa DelBelloMelissa DelBello: Research psychiatrist, University of Cincinnati was cited for her failure to disclose to the university much of what she had earned from pharmaceutical companies. In 2002, she was the lead author of a study that reported some patients benefited from the antipsychotic drug Seroquel, which is manufactured by AstraZeneca, which paid her $100,000 in 2003 and $80,000 in 2004. She disclosed that she’d received $100,000 from the company between 2005 and 2007, but federal investigators discovered it was more than double that—$238,000.


Frederick GoodwinFrederick Goodwin: Former National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) director, Goodwin earned at least $1.3 million between 2000 and 2007 for giving marketing lectures to physicians on behalf of drug makers—a fact he did not reveal to the audience, broadcaster or producers of “The Infinite Mind,” that he hosted on the National Public Radio during its 10-year run.  Subsequently, NPR removed the program from its schedule.  Lichtenstein Creative Media issued a statement that this income was a violation of the contract between the company and Goodwin.


Charles NemeroffCharles Nemeroff: Professor and Chairman of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. From 2000 through 2006, Nemeroff received just over $960,000 from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), but only disclosed no more than $35,000 to Emory. Between 2000 and 2007, he earned more than $2.8 million from various drug makers but failed to report at least $1.2 million. He signed a letter in 2004 promising Emory administrators that he would earn less than $10,000 a year from GSK but on the same day he was at a hotel earning $3,000 of what would become $170,000 in income from the company—17 times greater than the figure he agreed upon. He was the principal investigator for a five-year $3.9 billion grant financed by the NIMH for which GSK provided the drugs, during which he received more than the annual $10,000 threshold allowed from the company. In 2006, he stepped down as editor of Neuropsychopharmacology after publishing a favorable review of the vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) device, manufactured by Cyberonics, for which he was a paid consultant.  In 2003, he coauthored a favorable review of three therapies in Nature Neuroscience failing to mention his significant financial interests in these, including owning the patent for one of the treatments—a lithium patch.  Nemeroff has consulted for 21 drug and device companies simultaneously.  In 1991 Nemeroff testified before the FDA on behalf of Eli Lilly in hearings into Prozac, saying that the drug did not cause suicidal acts of ideation—yet 13 years later, the FDA concluded the opposite and issued a black box warning about suicide risks. Nemeroff resigned his position at Emory in 2008.


Martin KellerMartin Keller: Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University, chairman of the psychiatry department at the Alpert Medical School, Keller’s study (329) on GSK’s Paxil use in children and adolescents and its authors have been fiercely criticized in medical journals for allegedly misrepresenting data, suppressing information linking the drug to suicidal tendencies and reaching a conclusion unsupported by the relevant data. There are also claims that a GSK-affiliated employee ghostwrote Study 329, while Keller et al. made huge sums of money from the antidepressant manufacturer.  In 1999, it was disclosed that while serving as chief of the psychiatry department at Brown University, Keller earned more than $842,000 from Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Wyeth-Ayerst and Eli Lilly, makers of antidepressants he “lauded in a series of medical research reports.” After a three-year criminal investigation by the Attorney General’s Office, Brown University “agreed to return $300,170” of taxpayer money to the state of Massachusetts for psychiatric research Keller’s psychiatry department never performed. Additionally, Keller did not disclose the extent of his financial ties with companies to the medical journals that published his research—this included $93,199 in 1998.  In the same year that Keller authored a review article in Biological Psychiatry, and concluded that the newer antidepressants were more effective, he received $77,400 in personal income and $1.2 million in research funding from the makers of two of these drugs.  In April 2009, Keller announced he was stepping down as chair of psychiatry at Brown.


Augustus John RushAugustus John Rush: Former Vice-Chairman of the Dept. of Clinical Sciences at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and now working at Duke University’s medical school in Singapore. He was criticized for disclosing only $3,000 of the nearly $18,000 that Eli Lilly had paid him in 2001.  Between 2000 and 2007, he neglected to report another $12,000 from various drug companies. His research studies list financial relationships with more than 20 pharmaceutical companies. In 2003-2005 he received an NIH grant to conduct a clinical training program that dealt with, among other things, medical ethics.


Alan SchatzbergAlan Schatzberg was appointed APA President in May 2009, despite the exposure of his conflict of interest. As exposed in The New York Times and other media, Schatzberg owned $6 million equity in drug developer Corcept Therapeutics at the same time that he was principle investigator in an NIH-funded, Stanford-based study of Corcept’s drug mifepristone. Schatzberg had initiated the patent application on mifepristone to “treat psychotic depression” in 1997. He co-founded Corcept in 1998, and in 1999, extended the NIH grant for the study of psychotic depression to include mifepristone. In 2008, Schatzberg stepped down from his position as principal investigator in the study following months of Congressional scrutiny regarding his financial ties to the drug industry.


Thomas SpencerThomas Spencer: Assistant Director of the Pediatric Psychopharmacology Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, he is under Senate investigation for reportedly failing to disclose at least $1 million in earnings from drug companies between 2000 and 2007.


Karen WagnerKaren Wagner: Professor, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston reportedly failed to disclose more than $150,000 in payments from GSK. Between 2000 and 2008, Wagner had worked on NIH-funded studies on the use of Paxil to treat teenage depression and was a co-researcher on Study 329 (See Keller). In 2001, when study 329 was published, the company reportedly paid her $18,255. Between 1998 and 2001, she was one of several researchers participating in more than a dozen industry-funded pediatric trials of antidepressants and other drugs.  In her Zoloft study, Wagner said she had received “research support” from several drug makers, including Pfizer, but did not disclose she had received “sizeable payments” from Pfizer for work related to the study. Between 2000 and 2005 GSK paid her $160,404, but only $600 was disclosed to the university. In 2002, Eli Lily also paid her over $11,000, which was not disclosed.


Timothy WilensTimothy Wilens: Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston allegedly failed to report that between 2000 and 2007 he had earned at least $1.6 million from drug makers. Federal grants received by Dr. Joseph Biederman (above) and Wilens were administered by Massachusetts General Hospital, which in 2005 won $287 million in such grants.  He is under Congressional investigation.

NATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR THE MENTALLY ILL: The Senate Finance Committee also requested the financial records of NAMI, a group long accused of being a covert marketing arm of the pharmaceutical industry.  The mental health alliance, which is hugely influential in many state capitols, has refused for years to disclose specifics of its fund-raising, saying the details were private. But according to investigators in Mr. Grassley’s office and documents obtained by The New York Times, drug makers from 2006 to 2008 contributed nearly $23 million to the alliance, about three-quarters of its donations.”

While the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), claims to be an advocacy organization for people with “mental illness,” its actions indicate otherwise. The goup opposed the black box warnings on antidepressants causing suicide for under 18 year olds in 2004, and black box warnings on ADHD drugs causing heart attack, stroke and sudden death in children in 2006, when you look at their biggest source of funding: Pharma.

Read NY Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/health/22nami.html?_r=2

Other investigations…


William Weeks: A Dartmouth Medical School professor of psychiatry and community and family medicine, in May 2009, acting U.S. attorney Paul Van de Graff charged the psychiatrist with five federal misdemeanor counts regarding conflict of interests.  The U.S. Attorney’s Office also filed an 11-count civil complaint, including 6 counts of conflict of interests, 4 counts of false claims and one count of “breach of fiduciary [financial] duty.”  Weeks was allegedly involved in price-fixing contracts in 2003, both initiating the contracts on behalf of the VA and monitoring them.


Jeffrey Bostic, director of school psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, was named in a 34-page court complaint in U.S. District Court in Boston as being a “star spokesman” in helping Forest Laboratories illegally promote its drugs, Celexa and Lexapro for pediatric use despite not having FDA approval for such use. Court documents in March 2009 revealed that the drug company paid Bostic kickbacks, including lavish meals and cash payments disguised as grants and consulting fees, to induce doctors to prescribe the drugs. Forest also paid Bostic to meet other physicians in their offices in order to ease their concerns about prescribing the drugs. The Boston Globe revealed, “…the allegations against Forest are part of a legal and political backlash against potential conflicts of interest in medicine, particularly in psychiatry.”

MORE ON APA-PHARMA CONFLICTS

The APA is steeped in a conflict of interest with the pharmaceutical industry. After all, it has made at least $40 million just in sales of its diagnostic manual, the billing bible that psychiatrists use for insurance reimbursement for “treatment”—most often psychotropic drugs.   Consider:


Nada StotlandNada Stotland: The 2008 APA President, Stotland serves on the Board of the National Mental Health Association (now called Mental Health America), a group that received over $3 million in pharmaceutical company funding in one year alone. In 2008, Pfizer donated at least $500,000 to Mental Health America while Eli Lilly donated $600,000. Stotland is on the speakers’ bureau for Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).


David KupferDavid Kupfer: A member of the DSM-IV Task Force and Chair of the DSM-V Task Force.  He has been a consultant to Eli Lilly & Co., Johnson and Johnson, Solvay/Wyeth, Servier and also sat on the advisory boards of Forest Labs and Pfizer.  In 2008, Kupfer also disclosed that he had been a consultant for Forest Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer Inc., Hoffman La Roche, Lundbeck and Novartis.


Dilip V JesteDilip V. Jeste: APA Trustee and Member of the DSM-V Task Force is a consultant to Bristol-Myers Squibb, Lilly, Janssen, Solvay/Wyeth and Otsuka; honoraria from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Janssen and Otsuka; received “supplemental support to NIMH-funded grants” from Astra Zeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, and Janssen in the form of donated medication for the study, “Metabolic Effects of Newer Antipsychotics in Older Patients.”  Jeste’s 2008 APA disclosure for the DSM-V Task Force stated he received honorarium from Abbott, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly Janssen, Pfizer-Eisai, Solvay-Wyeth and Otsuka. He also received consulting fees from nine pharmaceutical companies.


Steven SharfsteinSteven Sharfstein: Former APA president who sat on the Board of Directors of the American Psychiatric Foundation (APF), an organization formed by the APA that lists 17 major pharmaceutical companies as its corporate adviser.  Since 1992, he has been President and CEO of Sheppard Pratt Health System and in 2002, he signed on 6 pharmaceutical companies to test their products at Sheppard Pratt. He signed contracts with Eli Lilly & Co., Merck and Janssen Research Foundation.


Alan SchatzbergAs covered elsewhere in this site, Alan Schatzberg was appointed APA President in May 2009, despite the exposure of his $6 million conflict of interest with drug developer Corcept Therapeutics at the same time that he was principle investigator in an NIH-funded, Stanford-based study of Corcept’s drug mifepristone. Schatzberg co-founded Corcept in 1998, and in 1999, extended the NIH grant for the study of psychotic depression to include mifepristone. Dr. Schatzberg co-wrote Textbook of Psychopharmacology with Dr. Charles Nemeroff who is also under Senate Finance Committee investigation for undisclosed conflicts of interest.

DSM: “DIAGNOSIS AS A SOURCE OF MONEY”

In an interview with a psychiatrist outside the American Psychiatric Association conference in May 2009, he commented: “The DSM stands for Diagnosis as a Source of Money”! How true.  The financial conflicts between psychiatrists involved with psychiatry’s billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV and DSM-V) Task Forces are under scrutiny and the potential pharmaceutical company influence on what “disorders” are included in the DSM.  This is especially so as they contribute to the current $25 billion in annual antipsychotic and antidepressant drug sales in the U.S. alone.

A study by Dr. Lisa Cosgrove, Ph.D., from the University of Massachusetts, Boston and Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Harold Bursztjanin showed that despite the APA instituting a disclosure policy for DSM-V (due out in 2012), only 8 out of 27 members of the DSM Task Force had no industry relationship. “The fact that 70% of the task force members have reported direct industry ties—an increase of 14% over the percentage of DSM-IV task force members who had industry ties—shows that disclosure policies alone…are not enough and that more specific safeguards are needed,” stated Dr. Cosgrove.  Further, “pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in the structure and content of DSM, and in how the symptomology is revised.”

A 2006 study by Dr. Cosgrove and Sheldon Krimsky, a Tufts University professor, determined how 56% of the170 psychiatrists who worked on the 1994 edition of the DSM (IV) had at least one monetary relationship with a drug maker. The study also found that every one of the “experts” on DSM-IV panels overseeing so-called “mood disorders” (which includes depression) and “schizophrenia/psychotic disorders” had undisclosed financial ties to drug companies.  At the time, international sales of drugs to “treat” these conditions were more than $34 billion.

Dr. Irwin Savodnik, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, commented at the time: “The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry.”

Filed Under: Issues Tagged With: APA and Pharma conflicts, Psychiatric conflicts of interest, psychiatry investigated, psychopharma conflicts of interest

What Is Mental Health Screening?

May 2, 2011 By CCHR Texas

WHAT IS MENTAL HEALTH SCREENING?

Screening is a very controversial so-called “diagnostic psychiatric service” (aka suicide survey) done on children who are then referred to psychiatric treatment. It’s a questionnaire that asks such things as “Have you often felt very nervous when you’ve had to do things in front of people?,” or “Has there been a time when nothing was fun for you and you just weren’t interested in anything?”

In a December 5, 2004 New York Post article, Marcia Angell, a medical ethics
lecturer at Harvard Medical School and author of “The Truth About Drug Companies,” said “It’s just a way to put more people on prescription drugs,” and that “such programs will boost the sale of antidepressants even after the FDA in September ordered a ‘black box’ label warning that the pills might spur suicidal thoughts or actions in minors.”

ISN’T SCREENING ADMINISTERED UPON PARENTAL CONSENT?

Child mental health screening is commonly done by cleverly bypassing the parents’ approval.

In some screening programs, a passive consent form is sent home to parents and if they don’t return it, the screening personnel consider that the parents approve. Screening officials favor passive consent because they say it boosts their chances of screening kids to 95% as opposed to the written parental consent technique.

THE OUTCOME OF MENTAL HEALTH SCREENING

As a pilot project for screening students, TeenScreen resulted in one-third of the subjects being flagged as “positive” for mental health problems. Half of those were turned over for mental health treatment.

The problem with this increase in diagnosis is that mental health labels are simply subjective – they can’t be medically verified through any physical test. Canadian psychologist Tana Dineen reports, “Unlike medical diagnoses that convey a probable cause, appropriate treatment and likely prognosis, the disorders listed in DSM-IV [the handbook of so-called mental disorders to which all psychiatrists refer] are terms arrived at through peer consensus”- literally, a vote by American Psychiatric Association (APA) committee members.

Because of these labels, it is estimated that over 8 million children in the U.S. are taking mind-altering psychotropic drugs to treat a “mental disorder.” Many of the drugs are not approved for use in children.

ISN’T SCREENING NEEDED TO PREVENT SUICIDE AND OTHER
PROBLEMS IN OUR YOUTH?

No.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) stated in the 1996 recommendations contained in the Guide to Clinical Preventive Services, Second Edition.1, that:

“… The USPSTF found no evidence that screening for suicide risk reduces suicide attempts or mortality. There is limited evidence on the accuracy of screening tools to identify suicide risk in the primary care setting, including tools to identify those at high risk (see Clinical Considerations). The USPSTF found insufficient evidence that treatment of those at high risk reduces suicide attempts or mortality. The USPSTF found no studies that directly address the harms of screening and treatment for suicide risk. As a result, the USPSTF could not determine the balance of benefits and harms of screening for suicide risk in the primary care setting.”

Filed Under: Mental Health Screening Tagged With: mental health screening, psychiatric drugging, suicide screening

Are Foster Kids Overmedicated?

April 14, 2011 By CCHR Texas

The Investigative Fund

Mar Cabra

Antipsychotics are the top-selling class of drugs in the United States, with sales of $14.6 billion in 2009 alone. Their use in children and adolescents in the United States is increasingly prevalent — and children in foster care are among the most likely to be medicated.

A recent 16-state study from Rutgers University on the use of antipsychotics in children and adolescents covered by Medicaid found that foster children received antipsychotic medications at a rate almost nine times that of other children covered by Medicaid.

The high expenditure on antipsychotics and other psychotropic drugs by the government has triggered a Government Accountability Office investigation into their use in foster care.

A segment on tonight’s episode of Need to Know, produced by myself, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Shoshana Guy, investigates the use and potential overuse of these medications on foster children, with a special look at the State of Texas.

The program follows a 12-year-old in the process of being adopted. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder by the age of five. Just up to a few months ago, he was on five different psychotropic drugs, including antipsychotic Zyprexa. Yet now that he’s with his adoptive father, he’s been reduced to taking just one drug, for Attention Deficit Hiperactivity Disorder.

Our segment explores the question: why such a radical change?

The Need to Know segment airs tonight [aired January 2011] at 8:30 on WNET in New York; check local listings for the broadcast in your area.

The project received support from The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund, as well as the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting.

You can also read the article here.

Filed Under: Child Drugging Tagged With: antipsychotic drugs, drugging children, foster children

WHISTLEBLOWERS
WANTED

CCHR is looking for anyone who knows of incidents of fraudulent prescribing, failure to follow Texas drugging guidelines for children or who has knowledge of illegal referral fees or kickbacks in the drugging of Medicaid children to come forward.

This includes knowledgeable employees of DFPS and HHSC, staff of any local office or clinic, any contractor, foster parent or citizen with knowledge.

Please use the short form below to get in touch with us and someone from our office will contact you. Your information is held in the strictest confidence.

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Texas Psychiatry News

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Abused children in Texas are being left in psychiatric facilities longer than they were six years ago as the state’s child protective services system grapples with federal court scrutiny and diminishing options, according to data obtained by The Texas Tribune. Last year, 17,151 Texas children were removed from abusive homes. While the agency could not say exactly how […]

There’s Little Outrage For 12,000 Kids Suffering in the Texas Foster Care System

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Houston police found the 16-year-old foster child in a park in early November 2013, just a few days after she ran away from a residential treatment center in northwest Houston. Rosario, a baby-faced, black-haired girl who carried a little extra weight, said she’d been selling her body for money. The cops returned her to the […]

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Citizens Commission on Human Rights of Austin

Citizens Commission on Human Rights of Austin
403 East Ben White Blvd.
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