Anyone in the UK (or with America with the BBC America channel) happen to see the recent new episode of Louis Theroux’s weird weekends, entitled ‘America’s Medicated Kids’? For those who missed it, he visited hospitals, special schools and families to find out about the extreme increase in children on medications.  I know it will be contraversial, but felt moved to make a few points regarding this programme.

1. It seemed overwhelmingly clear that these children were being over-diagnosed.  For instance, there was a boy who obviously had Asperger’s Syndrome…but other diagnoses such as Bipolar Disorder had been placed on him, because he had threatened suicide once.  I don’t mean to suggest that suicide threats shouldn’t be taken seriously; I just didn’t see how the circumstances detailed on the show were evidence of Bipolar Disorder.  As far as I could tell, the boy fadmitted he elt rejected by the world and lashed out in anger in reaction to these feelings.  Louis even tried suggesting this to the family, but they said they didn’t use specific hurtful words and therefore didn’t believe their son could feel that way.  But surely we all know you don’t need to hear the specific words to know there is an atmosphere around you.  They say dogs, for instance, can sense our fear; well, people can sense the emotions of those around them, too.  Obviously this boy’s parents loved him, but they also seemed to express a lot of frustration with him.  I believe calling his response to this ‘Bipolar Disorder’ is incredibly dangerous – especially when it leads to dosing him with daily anti-psychotics.

2. There was a girl with ADHD taking medication for her focusing difficulties.  At one point, she claimed she needed the pill because, without it, she was having headaches and feeling jittery with agitation.  Surely these are signs of addiction – after all, even Scientific American has previously released studies proving that if children take such drugs, it can alter their brain chemistry forever, and other notable scientific books have proven time and time again that taking these stimulants from such a young age, for so many years, can actually create amphetamine addicts out of the patients.

3. A little boy of 6 was on drugs for OCD.  What was his biggest obsession?  He couldn’t handle losing games.  As someone with OCD, who knows hundreds of others with OCD, this is not a symptom of OCD.  It’s a sign of something else – something that I’m sure is particular to that little boy, and something that is clearly being ignored in favour of OCD medications.  Later, when playing games with the boy, the adults around him constantly asked him if he was anxious, demanding that he rate his anxiety levels on a scale of 1-10.  Surely this is encouraging him to think of himself as an anxious child, and inducing a problem that might not otherwise be so extreme.  This is a classic example of something psychiatrists/psychologists have been criticised for doing for decades: projecting.

4. The mother of the Asperger’s child stated if she could medicate him for the Asperger’s, she would.  Autism / Asperger’s can be very difficult to deal with, it’s true – and I do hold sympathy for the parents in really tough situations.  However, Autistic Spectrum Disorders are also a form of personality – if one could medicate someone out of having an ASD, it would be equivalent to medicating someone into being a different person.  When did being a certain person, having a particular personality type, become a disorder requiring drugs?  Furthermore, the boy expressed multiple times that he, in a way, liked having Asperger’s – he felt it made him special and more intelligent and creative than people around him.  When did it become acceptable to medicate your child for something they are actually happy about and don’t want to change?

5. I believe all the children were labelled with Oppositional Defiant Disorder.  I agree their behaviour was terrifying and upsetting – but I disagree with this trendy new diagnosis children seem to be pegged with these days.  Their behaviour could be explained by all sorts of environmental/emotional causes, or even simply by their other more provable diagnoses.  When Louis tried discussing this with a doctor, the doctor fully agreed – but claimed in those cases it was necessary to medicate sooner…rather than proposing therapy for the family to work together to resolve the underlying emotional issues.

I won’t come out and say ‘all medicine is bad for you’ or ‘all doctors are evil’, because of course that’s not true.  And I’m not saying there aren’t some difficult family situations out there, or that there aren’t some children (and even adults) who are hard work and need a lot more care than their peers.  But it does terrify me that labels are being attached to children whose symptoms don’t, in fact, match the diagnostic criteria – that this leads them to be drugged up at such a young age, without any thought for alternative therapies – that we are turning to pills to answer all our problems, even if some of those problems are not chemical.

I also see this latest trend as no more than another form of labotomising our children in the 1950s.  The fact is: children can be difficult, and children can be hyper, and children can talk back to you and shout and bully.  Furthermore, some people are just naturally more aggressive or antisocial than others.  It doesn’t always mean there’s a medical problem at the root of it.

We seem to be heading swiftly toward an era imagined by the 1980s sci-fi movies, and not enough people appear to be aware it’s happening.  If the drugs are absolutely necessary, and the diagnoses are absolutely correct, then I understand the use of medication.  But please do educate yourselves on these diagnoses and make certain you agree with them – doctors do not know everything, and in many cases are being funded by pharmaceutical companies and therefore have a personal interest in prescribing the drugs.  This is not a conspiracy theory; it’s openly common knowledge for anyone wishing to know about it.  All one needs to do is a little reading.

And wherever possible, please do try alternative therapies.  Many have been proven to have a more effective and longer-lasting benefit than medications – without side effects.  I say this as someone with a long history of personal experience.

Vrinda Pendred, Editor & Founder of Conditional Publications

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