Langmaid Practice

Sunday 7 October 2012

Stop Labelling Children

There is no clearer example of the negative consequences of our need for labels, segmentation and fixes than the current epidemic of diagnosing children – and then subjecting them to an unapproved regime of mood altering stimulants or tranquillisers.

“Since 1993, the rate of antipsychotic drug prescribing to children increased by a factor of nearly eight, while prescribing to teens quintupled and in adults nearly doubled, according to a new study. Virtually all of this growth was seen in prescriptions for second-generation, or so-called atypical antipsychotic medications, which are often dispensed off label — meaning the drugs are prescribed for conditions that they are not specifically approved by the government to treat.”
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/08/09/antipsychotic-prescriptions-in-children-have-skyrocketed-study/#ixzz28bx8opgK

Often desperate mums and dads, working all hours God sends, are longing for a simple fix that will bring their children into a compliant, ‘normal’ state. But the long term prognosis of these treatments is that mostly they do not outperform a placebo and that always they have serious side-effects – some indeed going as far as to alter psycho-physical structures in developing brains. This eloquent video is an appeal to allowing our children their right to a unique personality and to the freedom to be kids.

This is another in the examples of an oppressive over-regulated, medicalised view of childhood that ineviably falls hardest on poor children and continues the disgraceful use of kids as targets for legal drugs.

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Posted by roy at 12:25 pm. No comments