A Hero Protects America’s Children From Psychiatric Abuse

Abstract

Jim Gottstein's Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights.org) has gone to court to stop the drugging of Alaska's children. Before they are given psychiatric drugs, Attorney Gottstein wants the following standards to be met: 1. That proven psychosocial interventions have been exhausted. 2. That the benefits of the drug outweigh the risks. 3. That those authorizing the prescriptions are fully informed about the risks and benefits and the alternatives. 4. That the children are thoroughly monitored, including for side effects. There is nothing radical in this attempt to require the state of Alaska to use science, good medical practice, and common sense before prescribing psychiatric medications to the children in its care. Too often the medications are prescribed solely for the convenience of managing them in institutions and foster care. An ethical sane society would bar the state from giving psychiatric drugs to children under almost any circumstances. Their brains are growing-and should not be made to develop in a toxic internal environment. Instead of psychiatric medication, they need what all children need-more and better attention from caring adults, improved family life, and better schooling. And they need protection from agencies and professionals who are now prescribing them psychoactive substances en mass instead of meeting their basic needs as children. About 15 years ago, I spent more than a week as a consultant in Alaska working with a marvelous wraparound program for children and youth (Breggin & Breggin, 1998, pp. 171-173; also see Morrison-Velasco, 2002, for a description of wraparound programs). Alaska had been farming out its more difficult children to the lower 48, as far away as Texas. Not only was the separation harmful to the children and their families, it was enormously expensive. So Alaska developed a program that aimed at the community wrapping its arms around the child and the child's family, and spending money to provide what the family needed to raise its children decently-everything from job and parent training for the mothers and fathers to counseling and tutoring for the children. A team that included a variety of professionals, teachers, and family members managed each family's treatment. Called the Alaska Youth Initiative, it provided great help to children and their families and kept the children from being institutionalized in expensive and abusive prisons or mental hospitals. While costly, it was much less expensive than institutionalizing these very distressed and distressing children in Alaska or elsewhere. Instead of creating career mental patients and criminals, it enabled children to stabilize and succeed at home with their own families. What happened to Alaska's wraparound program? It went the way of most good mental health programs-out of existence. Why? Because the psychopharmaceutical complex provides a seemingly much quicker and easier fix by pharmacologically suppressing the brains of our children. At every opportunity, organized psychiatry rejects effective psychosocial and educational programs, including proven family and home-based interventions, in favor of psychiatric drugs and institutionalization (Breggin, 2008). Attorney Gottstein points out that the state takes custody over children who have already been abused and suffered at the hands of adults and then saddles them with a mental illness diagnosis and drugs them. The extent of this state-inflicted child abuse is an emergency and should be corrected immediately. The children, of course, are involuntary patients. They need special protection from the state, not the erosion and destruction of their mental faculties or their brains on toxic agents (see Breggin, 2008, for documentation of the toxic effects of each class of psychiatric drug). Alaska is not an especially egregious offender. Government-sponsored and directed drugging of children is endemic throughout the 50 states. …