Subject: Re: Shocking Reports of Overmedicated Foster Children Force Government Review
Is there no end?
If you've not read, 10 Days in a Madhouse, by Jenny Bly, it is well worth the time. Compare how we treat one another today as to the kindly care of the brutish care takers of yesteryear. I doubt you'll find any significant difference.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----From: Miriam VieniSent: Saturday, June 30, 2012 7:07 PMSubject: Shocking Reports of Overmedicated Foster Children Force Government ReviewShocking Reports of Overmedicated Foster Children Force Government Review
Shocking Reports of Overmedicated Foster Children Force Government Review
Friday, 29 June 2012 13:06 By Martha Rosenberg, Intrepid Report | Report
Three years ago, Mirko and Regina Ceska of Crawfordville, Florida, 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 sought to improve protocols for
psychotropic medications in 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.
In 2007, Bristol-Myers Squibb settled a federal suit for $515 million
charging that it illegally hawked the antipsychotic Abilify to children and
the elderly, bilking taxpayers.
The next year, the state of Texas charged Johnson & Johnson subsidiary
Janssen with defrauding the state of millions with "a sophisticated and
fraudulent marketing scheme," to "secure a spot for the drug, Risperdal, on
the state's Medicaid preferred drug list and on controversial medical
protocols that determine which drugs are given to adults and children in
state custody."
Soon after, Idaho, Washington, Montana, Connecticut, California, Louisiana,
Mississippi, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah,
West Virginia, Arkansas and Texas took Big Pharma to court over the
antipsychotic spree.
When, during the same time period, the state of Florida began requiring
doctors to get approval for high priced antipsychotics before giving them to
kids under age six on Medicaid, more evidence of overmedication emerged:
prescriptions for the pills dropped from 3,167 in 2007 to 844 in 2008,
reported the Tampa Bay Times.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
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Martha Rosenberg
Martha Rosenberg is an investigative health reporter. Her first book, "Born
With a Junk Food Deficiency," has just been released by Prometheus books.
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Showing 6 comments
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. Mary SaundersError! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
Anatomy of an Epidemic, by Robert Whitaker, is probably the most prominent
book on this subject, but it is starting to be a genre. When Matt Taibbi
gets to it, the music industry will be paying attention. Maybe we will get
some song-writing about it, and it will get more attention. Some major
universities are implicated in some heart-rending cases.
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. 19 hours ago
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uest/e5d05131b11b75b1d197068559955dad/
. quizzyError! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
. weirdly ironic... how life saving these drugs can be when
administered correctly, and yet how treacherously and inhumanely they are
dispensed
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. 20 hours ago
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. sisterlaurenError! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
. Thank you for your reporting, I think you perform a valuable
service.
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. Nazani14Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
. I'll bet a lot of foster parents are pleased as punch to keep their
charges in a drugged fog.
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. 1 day ago
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. Kootenay CoyoteError! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
. Meanwhile, hemp is still illegal...
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. Jim of OlymError! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
. As a former child welfare worker, I'm really appalled at this
repost. I quit the field in 1990 and in Los Angeles County we weren't
drugging kids like this at that time (and we had almost 40,000 kids in
foster care then). These are the kids from dysfunctional families who will
be the parents of future dysfunctional families. Watch out. they might be
your neighbors bye and bye.
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Friday, 29 June 2012 13:06 By Martha Rosenberg, Intrepid Report | Report
.
. font size
Three years ago, Mirko and Regina Ceska of Crawfordville, Florida, 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 sought to improve protocols for
psychotropic medications in 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.
In 2007, Bristol-Myers Squibb settled a federal suit for $515 million
charging that it illegally hawked the antipsychotic Abilify to children and
the elderly, bilking taxpayers.
The next year, the state of Texas charged Johnson & Johnson subsidiary
Janssen with defrauding the state of millions with "a sophisticated and
fraudulent marketing scheme," to "secure a spot for the drug, Risperdal, on
the state's Medicaid preferred drug list and on controversial medical
protocols that determine which drugs are given to adults and children in
state custody."
Soon after, Idaho, Washington, Montana, Connecticut, California, Louisiana,
Mississippi, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah,
West Virginia, Arkansas and Texas took Big Pharma to court over the
antipsychotic spree.
When, during the same time period, the state of Florida began requiring
doctors to get approval for high priced antipsychotics before giving them to
kids under age six on Medicaid, more evidence of overmedication emerged:
prescriptions for the pills dropped from 3,167 in 2007 to 844 in 2008,
reported the Tampa Bay Times.
This piece
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