A Normal Kid

Jeff Weise was a normal kid.

He was just a “normal kid,” until his father killed himself in a police standoff, his mother told him his birth was a mistake and she wished he’d never been born. Jeff Weise listed hating, death and dying as his hobbies and interests on his website.

Jeff tried suicide with razor blades and a therapist put him on Class II narcotics to treat him for his depression (psycho pharmaceutical drugs without ongoing therapy.)

“My mom used to abuse me allot when I was little” and “She used to drink excessively too.” Were posted on a website attributed to Jeff Weise (Star Tribune, I Really Must Be Worthless, 3/24/05.)

A functioning child protection system would have at least been looking for seriously damaged children that fit Jeff’s profile. It is clear that Jeff Weise suffered childhood trauma and would have benefited by having a relationship with an adult who understood emotional and mental health issues.

Do we think we are saving money by not providing services to mentally ill children? Providing psychotropic medications to children with severe mental health issues without providing the therapy is wrong (and perhaps dangerous). There is a growing body of evidence that this approach leads to worse results than if left untreated.

The key here is therapy. Drugs with therapy can work. What are solvable problems to children receiving the help they need instead of the madness that created the violence that consumed Jeff.

As a volunteer guardian ad-Litem, this story is all too common. There are millions of abused and neglected children in this country who deserve the help that Jeff didn’t get either. Many of them are medicated with psychoactive narcotics without adequate therapy also.

A school administered mental health assessment would have discovered Jeff Weiss. He could have received the help he needed to lead a full and productive life. This child was not born crazy; he was made crazy by the adults in his life. No one helped him. He deserved better.

Jeff Weise killed seven people and wounded seven more before taking his own life on March 21st in Red Lake MN.

Back on the Drugs

A recent study by the Partnership For a Drug Free America reports that more teens abused a prescription painkiller in 2004, than ecstasy, cocaine, crack, or LSD.

Add these millions of painkiller abusers to the millions of youth prescribed Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, Welbutrin, and the multitude of other psychotropic Class II pharmaceutical drugs ingested by teens, America might very well have ten to twenty percent of it’s youth drugged with illegal or poorly monitored psychotropic medications.

I say poorly monitored because my experience as a guardian ad-Litem is that psychotropic drugs are being distributed to many children for many reasons without the therapy that would insure the monitoring of serious side effects. Many of the terrible murders and suicides being witnessed today have been committed by youth using Prozac, Ritalin and other psychotropic medications without adequate therapies.

How many teachers are aware of the number of children in their classrooms using these drugs (legally or illegally?).

Fifty to seventy percent of the children in the Juvenile Justice system have diagnosable mental illness. As a guardian ad-Litem, I believe the statistic holds true for children in the Child Protection system also (50% to 75%.)

Teachers and administrators are being blamed for the high rate of dropouts and low student achievement. I would make the argument that the number of drug using and mentally ill children in our schools today interferes dramatically with the business of education. Don’t blame the teachers or school administrators. What’s wrong is poor public policy.

A discussion around early childhood programs, mental health services, and the use of psychotropic medications is overdue.


partnership for a drug free America

the states definition of abuse

As a guardian ad-Litem I am following the legislative discussions around the topic of mental health services in our public school systems. I am painfully aware of the lack of knowledge at all levels of this discourse.

Very few teachers, administrators, politicians, (our public stewards) or citizens know why school drop out rates are so high, graduation and literacy rates are so low, and so many children are in trouble with the law.

As a person who has become familiar with many children who have been removed from their homes, I know what a traumatic life a child must live before being taken from a toxic home.

By definition, children remain with their birth parents until their lives are in danger of “ imminent harm.” This is called the Imminent Harm doctrine and it defines the statutory circumstances under which a child may be removed from their home. Or, as I call it, the doctrine of “the bruised and the bleeding.”

Most people have a misconception of child abuse. I too thought I knew the nature and definition of the word before I became a guardian ad-Litem. An accurate definition of child abuse must take into account the severity and repetition of abuse that are legally necessary for a child to be removed from their home.


Child abuse redefines the way a child thinks and sees the world. Abused children have severely limited learning and coping skills. An abused child’s mental development has been arrested by an anxiety and fear that supercede the learning of other personal and social skills. Without personal and social skills, and a lessening of the anxieties and fears, Abused children fail at school, don’t make friends, and keep a terribly low self image.

This is why school drop out rates are so high, graduation and literacy rates are so low, and so many children are in trouble with the law.

Medicating children with Prozac, Ritalin, and other psychotropic medications may lessen their dangerous behaviors, but without adequate counseling and mental health therapies, their fears and anxieties will continue to interfere with their development and personal growth. Abused children will not fit into our communities. They will continue to fill our jails and be a great burden to our schools.

There are thousands of abused and neglected children in our schools with almost no mental health services (there are 49 child psychiatrists in our state) and extremely limited school counseling of any kind (900 students per counselor is the statewide average.)