It is no secret that foster children can be dangerously
overmedicated. Three years ago, Mirko and Regina Ceska of Crawfordville, FLA
told former Gov. Charlie Crist their two adopted 12-year-olds had been
prescribed 11 pills a day, including the powerful antipsychotic Seroquel,
reported the Tampa
Bay Times.
"These girls were overdosed and would fall asleep right in front of us several times a day," Mirko Ceska told Crist at an "Explore Adoption Day'' event. "It seems to be a prerequisite for foster children to be on medication," said Ceska, calling the pills "chemical restraint."
The couple's remarks came on the heels of the suicide of Gabriel Myers, a 7-year-old in Florida foster care who was prescribed psychiatric drugs, including Symbyax, not approved for children because of links to suicidal thinking. More than 15 percent of 20,000 foster care children in Florida are medicated, says the Times and doctors and case managers treating medicated 6- and 7-year-olds "routinely failed to complete legally required treatment plans, share information or properly document the prescribing of powerful psychiatric drugs."
Now, less than a year after passage of the Child and Family
Services Improvement and Innovation Act (which requires state child welfare
agencies to adopt "protocols for the appropriate use and monitoring of
psychotropic medications" for children) three government agencies--the
Administration for Children and Families, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration--are
convening a meeting with hundreds of state officials to address medication
guidelines on August 27 and 28.
"This is an urgent issue, and child-centered
organizations and individuals need to let state and federal administrators,
Congress and state legislators know that it needs immediate action," says
Edward Opton, a psychologist and lawyer involved in child welfare issues. "The
medical literature shows no studies of the long-term effects of antipsychotic
drugs on children, including drugs for so-called conduct disorder, the
condition for which they are most frequently prescribed to children. There are
no data on drugged vs. undrugged children with respect to completion of school,
employment, early pregnancy, imprisonment, or subjective quality of life as
evaluated by the children or by anyone else."
Both private and public youth facilities have been plagued with scandals. One large provider, Universal Health
Services Inc., known as the "Standard Oil of mental illness,"
recently agreed to pay $6.85
million to the U.S. and the state of Virginia to settle allegations that
its Keystone Marion Youth Center provided "substandard psychiatric
counseling and treatment to adolescents in violation of Medicaid requirements,
falsified records and submitted false claims to the Medicaid program." It
chose to close the youth center.
There were two suicides in the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice's system of eight facilities between September 2008 and September 2009 and a follow-up report disclosed that a full 98 percent of the children are on psychoactive drugs.
Like the elderly in state care, children in state care prove tempting targets for both disreputable operators and Big Pharma because they do not make their own medication decisions, they are covered by public funds and the designation of behavioral problems in such settings is seldom questioned. Profit schemes often involve expensive antipsychotics like Seroquel, Zyprexa, Risperdal and Geodon whose safety and efficacy are in dispute, especially in children and the elderly.
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