There are many, many fatalities associated with appropriate use of prescription medication in the US each year - more than are caused by Schedule I drugs by a wide margin. I've been shocked to learn some of the things that are NOT required for a drug to be marketed with FDA approval, including interactions and possible terratogenic effects - it wouldn't surprise me to learn that requirements for child safety were minimal.

I've been researching dextromethorphan recently and one thing I have found is that there is no good data on what would constitute a lethal dose, although everyone seems to agree it would be very high. LD50s are derived from animal studies, of course, and the degree to which human-appropriate data on toxicity can be extrapolated from such studies is a big question.

I can't weigh in on diagnosis of bipolar and ADHD in a 2 year old, other than to say that it sounds insane on its face.

It certainly is pretty insane and unethical. I think everyone can agree that the pharmaceutical industry is completely amoral (if not actively evil) in their search for profits. Of course, this is just the logical outcome in a world where profit always trumps ethics and compassion.

Of course it's hard to know the whole story, and it's just a sad story all the way round really. In a situation where a small child is given this kind of diagnosis, the parents are just as (ir)responsible as the doctor. Even when you factor in their ignorance, it seems that there's a distinct lack of actual innocence. If you read the Boston article it's pretty clear that the father was avoiding treating his own anger and abuse issues. So no doubt he was being angry and violent which means his children would mirror him, as well as suffer from living in an emotionally unhealthy environment which would lead them to act out. He'd obviously prefer to think he has a mental illness which he is helpless to overcome (or that the problem is with his children) than admit to behavioral problems and anger issues and seek appropriate therapy. Obviously the wife is also in denial. Instead of being adults and accepting responsibility for how their own actions were harming their children and seeking help for themselves, and making sheltering and protecting their children a priority, they chose to use drugs to make their children manageable. And, if they weren't docile enough, they just kept giving them more drugs. I'm not saying they didn't love their children but they certainly put their own comfort first if you look at how they administered the drugs.

The psychiatrist should lose her license. Not only for inappropriately prescribing drugs but also for negligence. Even from reading a news article, it's clear that there are psycho-social dimensions to these children's behavioral problems and issues within the home that would cause these sorts of behavioral problems. Of course, this may have been the only option open to both the psychiatrist and the family that would have been covered by health insurance. American health insurers are notoriously pro-medication and anti-talk therapy because it's cheaper and faster to pretend the problem's been dealt with by handing out a prescription. I suspect that this may be a bigger causative factor here than will be reported. The problem is as much one of the system as it is one of parents and doctors who put an emphasis on control and conformity while ignoring dysfunctional psycho-social dynamics and rather basic childhood needs (like enough exercise every day, healthy food not Sugerinos for breakfast, enough really engaging and positive mental and emotional stimulation, love and acceptance, etc).

Another of the other problems here may be that many psychiatrists (especially in the US) tend to consider all mental and emotional problems to be chemically based and therefore best treated through medication. Drug companies of course love and encourage this, only funding studies that compare different psychoactive drugs for efficiency but not funding studies that compare talk therapies and drug therapy (ever since a study came out that showed talk therapy to be more effective in the long term - with or without drugs as well). This isn't to say that psychoactive drugs can't be very useful tools, it just goes to show that drugs alone can't deal with situations that require learning to change behavior and thought patterns, and psychosocial dynamics.

Really, this is just an extreme case of what's going on across the US every day (this happens in other countries too obviously but the way medicine functions in the US makes it way more prevalent than in other countries).

Hi Kevin,
If you are looking to understand childhood bi-polar disorders you may look in the direction of food allergies. In my practice of 37 years I have certainly seem my share of manic children. When we get the young people off of milk, wheat, soy, and corn, almost all become symptom free. My question is, "Why doesn't every MD in the country know this?"

If there really is an issue with ADD/ADHD, regulation of neurotransmitter levels almost always take care of the problem.

By the way, in all my years of practice, what I have found is that practically all cases of bi-polar disorder are caused by the misuse of prescription medications and the resulting brain damage.

You raise interesting topics.

This makes me want to cry. I think I am going to be sick! Psychiatry is a very new science, and has the wrong goals in mind. Handing out SSRI's to everyone serves sinister purposes. They have peppermint flavored Prozac for children now... What child needs Prozac???? No one needs Prozac! In my studies, I have found that many psych meds take away the sense of conscious and alters people to run on a frequency to were they do not cope with anything important in their life. It's as if they sleep through some very important life lessons, survival lessons. We have damaged ourselves enough with environmental toxins, which have been correlated with mental disorder. So what do they do? They offer very unnatural, harmful poisons to obscure our natural thought processes even more! The mental disorder epidemic America is facing is a sign that we need to focus our attention on alternate methods of dealing with our minds. Truth is, the brain is an amazing wonderful tool for healing one's self and knowing what it needs. The resources have been given to us naturally, we just need to tap into them, and stop letting money hungry corporations tell us what we need.