Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.
Full article here:
NYT: Foster kids often given antipsychotic medications - Health - Children's health - msnbc.com
Seems to me many foster kids are more likely to suffer from mental illness, so this didn't surprise me. It's statistical, it doesn't mean that these kids are being irresponsibly medicated. But it's once again a "we're overmedicating our kids unnecessarily" kind of slant from people that don't know what it's like to raise a difficult child, and that sometimes medications are a last resort, or a means of stabilizing behaviors while you work on underlying issues. As the final paragraph says:
The psychiatrists who are treating these kids on the front lines are not doing it for money; there are very low reimbursement rates from Medicaid, said Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, a mental health services researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. Theres enormous anguish because everyone knows that this is not what we should be doing for these kids. We as a society simply havent made the investment in psychosocial treatments, and so we are forced to rely on psychotropic drugs to carry the burden.