Long and very good look at the increased use of medications with children....
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...24875493&hl=en

FRONTLINE EXAMINES WHY MORE THAN 6 MILLION AMERICAN CHILDREN ARE TAKING POWERFUL PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS

FRONTLINE presents
THE MEDICATED CHILD
Tuesday, January 8, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS


www.pbs.org/frontline/medicatedchild
In recent years, there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of children being diagnosed with serious psychiatric disorders and prescribed medications that are just beginning to be tested in children. The drugs can cause serious side effects, and virtually nothing is known about their long-term impact. “It’s really to some extent an experiment, trying medications in these children of this age,” child psychiatrist Dr. Patrick Bacon tells FRONTLINE. “It’s a gamble. And I tell parents there’s no way to know what’s going to work.”
In The Medicated Child, airing Tuesday, January 8, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE producer Marcela Gaviria confronts psychiatrists, researchers and government regulators about the risks and benefits of prescription drugs for troubled children. The biggest current controversy surrounds the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Formerly called manic depression, bipolar disorder was long believed to exist only in adults, but, in the mid-1990s, bipolar in children began to be diagnosed at much higher rates, sometimes in kids as young as 4 years old. “The rates of bipolar diagnoses in children have increased markedly in many communities over the last five to seven years,” says Dr. Steven Hyman, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. “I think the real question is, are those diagnoses right? And in truth, I don’t think we yet know the answer.”
Like many of the 1 million children now diagnosed with bipolar, 5-year-old Jacob Solomon was initially believed to suffer from an attention deficit disorder. His parents reluctantly started him on Ritalin, but over the next five years, Jacob would be put on one drug after another. “It all started to feel out of control,” Jacob’s father, Ron, told FRONTLINE. “Nobody ever said we can work with this through therapy and things like that. Everywhere we looked it was, ‘Take meds, take meds, take meds.’”
Over the years, Jacob’s multiple medications have helped improve his mood, but they’ve also left him with a severe tic in his neck which doctors are having trouble fully explaining. “We’re dealing with developing minds and brains, and medications have a whole different impact in the young developing child than they do in an adult,” says Dr. Marianne Wamboldt, the chief of psychiatry at Denver Children’s Hospital. “We don't understand that impact very well. That’s where we’re still in the Dark Ages.”
DJ Koontz was diagnosed with bipolar at 4 years old, after his temper tantrums became more frequent and explosive. He was recently prescribed powerful antipsychotic drugs. “It is a little worrisome to me because he is so young,” says DJ’s mother, Christine. “If he didn’t take it, though, I don’t know if we could function as a family. It’s almost a do-or-die situation over here.” DJ’s medicines seem to be helping him in the short run, but the longer-term outlook is still uncertain. “What’s not really clear is whether many of the kids who are called bipolar have anything that’s related to this very well-studied disorder in adults,” says Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute for Mental Health. “It’s not clear that people with that adult illness started with what we’re now calling bipolar in children. Nor is it clear that the kids who have this disorder are going to grow up to have what we used to call manic-depressive illness in adulthood.”
While some urge caution when it comes to bipolar in children, FRONTLINE talks with others who argue that we should intervene with drug treatments at even younger ages for children genetically predisposed to the disorder. “The theory is that if you get in early, before the first full mood episode, then perhaps we can delay the onset to full mania,” says Dr. Kiki Chang of Stanford University. “And if that’s the case, perhaps finding the right medication early on can protect a brain so that these children never do progress to full bipolar disorder.”
FRONTLINE’s 2001 documentary Medicating Kids can be watched online at www.pbs.org/frontline/shows/medicating
The Medicated Child is a FRONTLINE co-production with RAINMedia, Inc. The writer and producer is Marcela Gaviria. The co-producer is Will Cohen. FRONTLINE is produced by WGBH Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers. Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation. FRONTLINE is closed-captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and described for people who are blind or visually impaired by the Media Access Group at WGBH. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. The executive producer of FRONTLINE is David Fanning.
pbs.org/pressroom
Promotional photography can be downloaded from the PBS pressroom.
Press contacts
Diane Buxton
(617) 300-5375
diane_buxton@wgbh.org
Alissa Rooney
(617) 300-5314
alissa_rooney@wgbh.org
Phil Zimmerman
(617) 300-5366
phil_zimmerman@wgbh.org

i am not a mother so i want to first say that "if you were in my shoes" thoughts from those who are mothers, i must accept hands down. but i have read a lot. Not only on bipolar and meds, but also on child psychology and developmental stages.

Consider how up in arms we are about how young kids are taking street drugs... and the forefront issue being how they "mess up their brains." And YES, they DO. Street drugs, esp. strongly psychoactive ones like LSD, ecstasy (however you spell that!) the older qualudes and amphetamines, but even marijuana, milder in its effects, are psychoactive and, in pre-adults can alter the brain's development. That said, let's toss in some olanzapine and haloperidol ... well, these would only "correct sx" ?? afraid not. The evolving brain is extremely sensitive to ALL psychoactive drugs, prescribable or other. Consider how most (if not all? not sure) APs for instance are not even approved/tested for children under 18. That is the reason.

in sum, in adults, psychoactive drugs (incl meds) affect neurological functioning. In children, they ALTER neurological DEVELOPMENT. A clean difference there. The administration of psychoactive drugs may "fix" a child's undesirable sx, but the long term neurodevelopmental results are unknown: It's a russian roulette!

Sooooooooooooooooooooooooo.....

i am tendentially against medicating children, in particular very young ones: 2-5 years old especially but even up to 10 years where the neuronal axons are not yet myelinated and neural modification is the norm... the basis of a child's learning abilities - acquisition of language and integration of new concepts, memory.

adolescents too i am skeptical about, tho not totally against medication - i am skeptical due to that time being so hormone-loaded that a real reallll careful evaluation needs to be made as to whether "strange" or manic-seeming behaviours are indeed such, or whether there be other reasons - influence of transgressive peers, or a strong rebellious nature, or ... many things.

Suicidality in teens is high partly because of the hormone cauldron they find themselves suddenly steeped in, which causes huge emotional disarray and often great distress. (Picture this: PMS 100 times worse and 365 days a year!) I feel that rather than medication, EARLY (pre-pubescent) family participation and contact with these young adults could make a big difference.

I believe parents need to EDUCATE THEMSELVES about phases like the terrible two's, child sexuality and discovery, prepubescent and adolescent phases, and ALSO be very mindful of whether there is FAMILY HISTORY of mental illness, esp bipolar, unipolar depressive, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorders.

Particularly in prepubescence i believe that parents need to INITIATE CONTACT with their children, in an accepting way, of the hormone broth that will come, to favour a child's ease in communicating their feelings and any emotional turmoil to the parents - right away! the point of this is not to avoid medication, nor to pre-empt full mania, but to give the children the communicative tools to cope (family support) with their transition into adulthood, as well as to give the parents an early panorama, and, consideration of family history but also respecting a child's PERSONALITY, make decisions as to whether any strange behavior be thought of as a growing phase (with due vigilance, mind!) or if it be red flags for a true mental disorder.

~ waves ~ warily stepping off the pulpit

Thanks for thinking of the parents that just lurk Folks.

Donnna

I have had a pneumonia at age five, which was at the time misdiagnosed as whooping cough, although I had been inoculated. It was not treated with antibiotics but with codeine. The fact that I kept on wheezing and coughing more often than other kids and having spells of light fever was seen as asthma. In fact my body had encapsulated the pneumonia, in an ever thickening layer of scar tissue. When I had a life-threatening flare-up at age 35 (resulting in total sepsis) an MRI scan finally showed up these facts. So I have been getting codeine on and off since age five.

When I tried sleeping pills, the first night they worked well. The second night they worked somewhat. The third night they did not do anything. That is how quickly I develop tolerance and/or addiction. Luckily, this happened when I was fifteen and it alerted me to stay away completely and utterly from anything addictive at all.

So, since codeine is known to be very addictive, I agree that it is even worse to give it to a child. My mother and younger sister are Narcissist, but I feel this has everything to do with upbringing and nothing with a hereditary proneness to mental illness, like e.g. in bipolar. There are no known cases of mental illness anywhere in my family. After my very first time of taking anti-depressants, I completely and utterly lost my mental balance. I have been diagnosed with bipolar, autism, borderline, ADHD and whatnot after this. Even though these things are surely for a large part due to my mother who hates me and kept on tripping me, always has, I still state that my case clearly shows, children that are given any kind of addictive drugs are thereby at least sensitized to addiction for life, a sensitivity which is supposed to be only hereditary. I also state that I have had an excessive amount of social problems, which could be a result of autism but are definitely, known fact, made worse by arrest of development in certain area's of the personality which always happens in cases of early addiction and often also in cases of child abuse.