UNPUBLISHED figures show that nearly 4000 children under the age of 10 were prescribed anti-depressants last financial year, including 553 children under five and 48 babies. ...more
Asked what circumstances might lead to a baby being treated with an anti-depressant drug, the spokesman for the pediatric division of the Royal Australian College of Physicians, John Wray said: "None that come to mind. The college would like to know who is prescribing these drugs to such young children and why." ...
...Two SSRI anti-depressants have Therapeutic Goods Administration approval to treat children as young as six years for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; other, older-style anti-depressants can be prescribed by doctors to treat bed-wetting. But even allowing for these conditions, Royal Australian College of Psychiatrists spokesman Peter Jenkins said the figures were mysterious and worrying. ...
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
What? Say that again
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6 comments:
I've worked with autistic kids.
They're in a parallel universe, their poor parents need all the help they can get. Extreme obsessive-compulsive is one of the first symptoms, around 3 yrs of age - little nazis.
I was once put on a powerful older anti-depressant because it reduces deep nerve pain. It changed my whole personalty too so I stopped taking it, but if the pain was bad enough I would pop a half.
You know Kae, people are basically superstitious like when they accept 'Global Warming' because of ancient beliefs about weather gods. Another one is the 'magic bullet' - one drug for one disease because God made it so. Drugs aren't like that, they have a spectrum of effects and their usefulness changes over time. Often it starts with side-effects, 'I noticed when I took X drug for Y, my Z condition got better'.
It seems unusual that so many children are being treated for depression - I have also seen an article which claims that many children are suffering from depression. I find that hard to believe, particularly toddlers.
To see why children may suffer from depression one only has to look at the latest scares peddled by people like Gore and teen icons banging on about the end of the world and animals as we know them.
Then look at the news. When I was growing up I was shielded from the news. I'm sure that I wouldn't have been hearing horror stories about how humans were destroying the world, and I'm pretty sure I never heard about kids being abducted or murders or anything like what's reported in news these days, complete with satellite availble graphic pictures. I have a very strong belief in this area that children should be protected from "the news" because they need to be kids for as long as possible, and I also belive that frightening the life out of kids at school with AGW etc is wrong, too.
Oh, I have a friend whose son has OCD. He washes his hands until they crack and bleed. This started very early in his life, probably when he was about 4 or 5 and had to wet his hair to comb it. It seemed to progress from there. His mother has OCD.
I think it would have helped him if we'd realised what the obsessiveness with the hair was, or where it would go, perhaps we could have mussed his hair and made him snap out of it.
I used to be a bit OC with pegs. Making sure that the colours matched. Then I realised what I was doing and stopped it. I could.
This boy is now 30, and I think he still had problems.
I cured my son of bed-wetting with behavior modification which consisted of placing a moisture sensing pad attached to an alarm under his sheets. When the alarm went off, I would have to get him out of bed and make him change his sheets. In four days, he was waking up to the alarm himself.
Bed-wetting is a sleep disorder, and it was cured in my son in less than a week (although some kids take longer). There's absolutely no reason a child should be dosed with drugs to cure bed-wetting, other than the parents are too lazy or too sleep-deprived themselves to want to bother with getting up and helping the kid change his sheets.
As for babies, there's NO reason to dose them with anti-depressants, none. I suspect parents are dosing their naturally active or colicky babies to make them sleep. It's an abdication of responsibility.
Guys, you'll be interested in this: A lady in hospital with me had severe Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Guess what the treatment was?
Codeine - an opiate like Morphine and Heroin. Causes severe constipation in healthy people, just ask Eric Clapton.
In the same way, just because a drug is classified 'antidepressant' doesn't mean that's what it's being prescribed for.
Kae, I think my OCD involves making multi comments on people's blogs. But thanks for giving me the opportunity to indulge.
Whether to be wrapped in pink blankies or blue ones, whether to wear cloth nappies or disposables, to breast or bottle feed; countless deliberations over political correctness all in the context of global warming and the need to reduce their carbon footprints. Is it any wonder newborns these days are so conflicted they cry until they get their anti-depressants?
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