By Sam Flatow

Medicine is an interesting field. In fact, it seems to be the only field which stays stagnant no matter what scientific advances have been made, and it seems that the exorcism is back.

As time goes on, of course, the details are different. There is still a church, a priest, and even a vial of holy water. The church is now an office, the priest has an MD, and the holy water comes in a pill; sometimes even up to eight different types.

What I’m talking is about the new abomination of parenting that is getting worse and worse. I’m writing this article after watching a PBS Frontline report called The Medicated Child. After watching the opening story of a child named Jacob, I was nearly brought to tears. After watching him later in life, I had to take a short break from the program.

The story is (apparently) pretty common. At the age of 2 his parents were told he was hyperactive. At 4, his preschool teacher suggested that he should take medication, and a year later he was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin. The Ritalin worked, but made him anxious (which is what a powerful stimulant will do). He was prescribed a second medication to control that, which gave him a tick or compulsion. At nin, he was diagnosed with a mood disorder. At age 10, he was on eight different medications. 8. E-I-G-H-T. A 10 year old on eight different psychiatric drugs. That kind of irresponsibility should incur a minimum 10 year sentence.

Eventually, the parents decided to take him off medication in the worse possible way: all at once. Most medication is supposed to be gradually reduced, and this poor kid had eight withdrawals all at the same time. It’s no wonder that the hospital believed he was bipolar (in under 24 hours) and stated that he needed to take lithium.

On the very morning of his 13th birthday, he had developed a tick that forced him to constantly roll his head.

Fast forward several years. Towards the end of the program, they return to Jacob. His head rolling is worse than ever. It even seems that his speech has regressed to before he was 10, and watching him verbally stumble through his doctor’s visit is heartbreaking.

The sad, sad irony? He now needs to take medication for a tick caused by overmedicating.

It’s depressing when powerful, mind altering drugs (and have no illusions, these pills are both powerful and mind altering no matter how anyone dilutes themselves otherwise) are prescribed to fragile developing minds. Even potent, and commonly abused, amphetamines are prescribed to children.

On the other side of things, the story of Jessica shows how medicating children can be incredibly beneficial. Honestly, Regan MacNeil is NOTHING compared to this child. Even her own father is clearly terrified of her. Bipolar medication helped immensely. Unfortunately, Jessica’s case seems to be an extreme rarity.

I’m not a parent, so I can’t give advice on how to raise children. Even if I was a parent, every child is different and has different needs. The one thing I can tell you is that parents need to be careful about what they think is a disorder-- sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

The people who should be held responsible are the doctors themselves. A plumber will not tell you just to jiggle the handle on a faulty sink because he wants to get paid to fix it. A doctor will not tell you that a child is needs a little attention or just help with their math homework when he gets paid to prescribe drugs. The truth of the matter is, the more a child is diagnosed with a mental disorder, the more the child will have to visit said doctor. The more visits, the greater the profit; in any business, profit is the bottom line.

On the other hand, I’d like to imagine that the issue is not entirely driven by bills. If one has gone through eight years of schooling to treat mental illness, then by God they will find some mental illness to treat! It’s pretty much finding a problem that you have just invented. A big contributer to the issue is the ambiguity of diagnosing a problem. Much of the field consists of educated guesses and judgement calls, and that can be a big problem when the placebo effect is so potent.

Luckily, there are many doctors creating a network of individual case studies to better study the field. This new method is the same one that was used for child cancer, and that helped phenomenally.

All said, it seems that there is far more room for ill than good at the moment. Hopefully, the future will bring more understanding of the problem, and with it more benefit.