We live at a time where five year old children are forced to take psychotropic medications and the promise that big pharma can cure anything from sexual dysfunction to better grades. Having grown up in the 60’s/70’s and experienced my own illegal drug use I’m somewhat attuned to the disparity that exists between 9 year old’s on Ritalin and 29 year old’s on cocaine.
Ritalin is a Cocaine derivative and was banned in Sweden because of the suicides (in 1968). I’ve written about the 7 year old foster child who hung himself and left a note decrying how he was being forced to live on Prozac. I speak here of Ritalin and Prozac as metaphor for all psychotropics used on children. Instead of enhancing our coping skills, these drugs make us zombies and put us at the mercy of a host of side effects and the very real experience of hopelessness.
I have myself experienced 
suicidal ideation as a result of Topamax, an anti seizure medication forced on me by the Mayo clinic as an off label cure for migraine headache (it did not work in so many ways).
Teachers, social workers, justice workers, and parents today are forced to collude with big pharma to medicate children . Children are no more able to handle suicidal ideation than they could handle rape. If you know someone using psychotropics, ask them if they have had the experience of suicidal ideation. 1/3 of youth in Georgia’s foster care system take psychotropic medications (most other state’s have the same statistic).
The topic needs much more attention.
There is nothing like it. There is no good excuse for substituting mental health help for children with psychotropics (especially where five year old’s are concerned).
Have we come to trust our professionals beyond their capacities? Have they created the conditions necessary for mass murder and mass failure in our communities?
We should recognize that overfilled prisons, unsafe streets, and failing schools cannot be made better by upping the dosage of Magic Potions?
I write today from the pain of a fifth suicide in my circle these past 24 months.
After all, up until the 70’s these folks (and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness) classified Homosexuality as mental illness. Mistakes were made.
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