If you didn’t catch the Front Line documentary, The Medicated Child last night on PBS you
can also watch it online, and I highly recommend that every parent make a date
with this frighteningly informative documentary. Gwynne Watkins interviewed
filmmaker Marcela Gaviria in Babble’s 5-Minute Time Out, who explores this new
phenomenon that has put six million American children on psychiatric drugs;
most of which have never been tested on children.
For all of our children’s sake, I wish this doc could be shown
at the hospital along with the lessons on breast-feeding and burping. My
husband and I struggled through the show last night, sickened by the
destruction of a seemingly happy and energetic kindergartener who is now a
young man besieged with too many physical tics and emotional problems to keep
track of in an hour-long special, all of them the result of experimental drug
cocktails. While there are certainly children who fall into the extremes, and
Gaviria shows them as well, the restructuring of the bipolar diagnoses to
include children previously diagnosed with ADHD has resulted in drugs such as
lithium being pumped into two-year-olds. If that doesn’t make your stomach turn
in the abstract, one look at the evolution of Jacob Solomon in The Medicated Child will make you vehemently
question this recent phenomenon to drug-up our spirited kids. And in turn question your teachers, doctors
and caregivers who advise you to seek medical attention and drug intervention
for our little ones. - April Peveteaux
