Frontline: The Medicated Child

I haven’t quite figured out why I punish myself like this, but I do it quite consistently. I am obsessed with how the bulk of child psychiatry is in bed with the pharmaceutical industry. I’ve always been obsessed with this and perhaps always will for a number of reasons. So, here I am, watching the tail end of this documentary – intermittently in tears.

I feel like this is my fault somehow. I know that it sounds delusional, but it’s not. I was seven and a half years old and halfway through second grade when my little, fragile, glass world was shaken thoughtlessly like a snowglobe.

I’d been in my own world for much of my life…confused about everything. When my grandparents adopted me, my parents abandoned me. Until I was ready for kindergarten, I resided with my great-grandmother. This is not a complaint as it all worked out in the end, but I was a scared little girl who was always afraid something would go horribly wrong at any moment. In school, I’d daydream…about a different life, a happy life, a “grass is greener” sort of life where my parents would come for me and comfort me. A life that would never be. I also feared that I would be abandoned, that I was unloved, and I’d already learned the sad fact that people will leave you no matter what…whether they want to or whether they have no choice…people will leave and if not, you will. I was tormented by night terrors and terrified of death.

The other kids always hated me and teased me, also picking on me because I opened my trap about being adopted. Teachers had been very cruel to me as well. I was in so much pain, but I pushed it deep down inside of me and pretended it was never there – a pretty smile to hide the pain.

I was seven years old, in second grade, hiding deep emotional pain, and bored due to a lack of challenging schoolwork. I daydreamed in school about having an intact, happy family and I was afraid that I would lose what I had. I was a scared, anxious little girl who needed a lot of emotional support and help. Therefore, the only solution was that I be evaluated, enter therapy, become diagnosed with ADD, and medicated with Ritalin.

I’ll keep this part brief and save it for another blog (maybe), but one diagnonsense led to another and one medication to another before I was on so many medications that I couldn’t even recognize myself. I was suicidal and losing my mind…and that was after the medications. I also found no value in myself because I’d been labeled and stigmatized as the mentally ill. Whether or not it was actual reality, it felt like people were afraid that I was contagious from there out – other kids, parents – for whatever reason I was a bad kid who had to take drugs to be good. I was just hurting and everyone wanted to ignore that and shovel shit down my throat so I’d sit in the corner and smile and nod like some fucking china doll who’d been smashed to bits and glued back together again.

I was a guinea pig for child psychiatry – partaking in one psychiatric evaluation after another and ultimately becoming involved with a large study at Mass General Hospital run by the infamous Dr. Joseph Biederman, who has quite the part in this PBS documentary as he’s had quite the part in destroying children’s lives based on the data he collected on me and children like me during this mockery of a study.

Please forgive my slightly fuzzy memory on this, I was heavily medicated during these years. When I began Biederman’s study, I was between 8 and 10 years old, leaning toward 10. There was then a follow-up at age 14, perhaps another in between, another follow-up when I was pregnant at 20, and yet another only 2-3 years ago. Ironically, from the information I received after each interview, every single testing session involving me alone was inconclusive.

When the study first began, I had the misfortune of being uncomfortably interviewed by the devil…erm Biederman…himself. Perhaps the second time as well, but again, pharmaceuticals can be a bitch. In any case, all later interviews were administered by Biederman’s lackeys and the last one was done via phone – towards the end, these lackeys were barely in my age bracket. While I was pregnant, they came to my grandmother’s house to interview me and also take blood and run a drug test. Knowing I was clean, I was still curious about the result of said drug test. After these two giggled in the bathroom like schoolgirls while running my drug test and emerged from my grandmother’s bathroom, I playfully asked if I’d gotten an “A” on my test. With quite the snarky little attitude, one of the little bitches replied that she couldn’t tell me the results of my own test and that I “should already know the answer to that.”

Given that my “diagnonsense” of ADD came when I was a child, I find absolutely no reason to be treated like a piece of shit by two little bitches that were probably just interns or minimum wage, rich bitch college students without so much as a bachelor’s degree never mind a brain in their useless, little, ditzy faces. That’s just one factor of BS in this whole mess.

In the meantime, Biederman is touted as child psych god while giving off the impression that he’d conducted study after study after study and I am sorry to say that I am pretty sure that he just conducted this one, big travesty of a study to support any agenda he needed it to while refreshing his theories and sending in lackeys for any of the drug company research he’s done since that’s garnered him his illegal millions of dollars in kickbacks – unless he just dusted off the pile of old research when he was updating all of our files after asking what medications we’d been prescribed – or else, just fabricating these things from whole cloth.

So, back to the documentary which contained facts already known to me, but again drove the point home so that I could get emotional about what doctors are telling parents and how they are buying in to diagnonsense bullshit and drugging their children with dangerous pharmaceuticals because some shithead with a piece of paper is taking a giant leap of a guess based on flawed research that their child has some disorder or series of disorders that may or may not exist. Biederman is directly responsible for a 4000% increase in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder, which did not even EXIST ten years ago. There is nothing in the DSM that says that bipolar disorder presents in children, yet children as young as two and a half are being diagnosed based on Biederman’s bullshit.

Parents trust doctors and most parents are completely misinformed. People look at me when I rant about things like this and think I need to slap on a tin foil hat and join the anti-Illuminati committee, but perhaps everyone else should just get their facts straight before more children die and more lives are ruined before they have the chance to begin.

I have an eight year old daughter who has emotional problems. Believe me when I say these are emotional and perhaps psychological, but not psychiatric. I refuse to be one of those misinformed parents who steps aside and allows some doctor make decisions for the rest of her life so that she will not be an inconvenience. Once that little girl became part of me, I vowed that I would always do what is right and not just what is convenient.

So, all of you parents that feel you have no choice but to medicate…you do have choices. No one can blame a parent for doing what they feel is best, but instead of thinking of the short term benefits and “how much better little Johnny is doing on his medication,” start to think about little Johnny’s future and how he’s going to be damaged goods forever because most of that shit is destroying a developing brain. He’s been labeled and stigmatized, at some point a child cannot come back from that. I don’t condemn you for doing what you think is right, but learn about what you are doing and understand the consequences. If the benefits outweigh the risks, then it is what it is, but NEVER do ANYTHING out of convenience or what is best for you and not what is truly best for your child.

Dr. Biederman Plays God With ADHD Meds

Backlash on Bipolar Diagnoses in Children

A Blogger’s Response to the Above Article

Senator Broadens Inquiry Into Psychiatrist

Joseph Biederman – PharmaGossip Blog

60 Minutes: What Killed Rebecca Riley?

DB Dr. Biederman’s Articles on Google Scholar

I am sure I will be back with this topic soon.