Medicated Children

I saw about 15 mins of a show on PBS last night talking about medicated children. One family they interviewed were told by daycare workers and pre-school teachers to consider putting their child on drugs. After a few years the parents finally did take the child to the Dr. and he was diagnosed with ADHD and medicated. However, the medication caused side effects like anxiety and therefore the child needed second and third types of drugs to deal with the side effects.

Another family had their 4 year old child on 8 different medications and while they were a little worried about long term effects they admitted they could not function as a family without their child medicated. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder due to his extreme moods.

The show went on to say that they are diagnosing children more and more with Bipolar, something that was never diagnosed in children before the mid -nineties. Now, there are a million children, as young as four on medication for this.

While I do believe that there are some isolated cases where children should be medicated, the growing number really concerns me. Honestly, shouldn't medication be the very last resort? The one family on the show said they weren't even offered therapy, it wasn't even suggested.

And where do daycare workers and pre-school teachers get off even suggesting drugs to a parent. What about adjusting teaching styles or allowing for different learning environments for a child to learn in?

I do not mean to judge the health care professionals or the parents I just know that if it were my kids (who can be very active with selective hearing at times) I would look for every other option before subjecting them to the long term side effects of medication, especially for a pre-schooler.

I don't know, maybe I'm just speaking from my ass. You can read the article here.