America Is Hooked on “Obedience Pills”

In the United States, the problems of difficult children are all too often solved according to the formula "less attention, more pills." Foster children suffering from depression are literally stuffed with psychotropic medications.

The advertisements for antidepressants indicate that if you are sad, lonely, and no one understands you, then you need to take a pill and everything will be fine. This is a naive cartoon that a child can understand. In the United States, children are prescribed psychotropic drugs, but only now is the Government Accountability Office (GAO) paying attention to the fact that the majority of these young patients are foster children.

Eighth-grader Lili Waldman talks about psychostimulants as if she were talking about vitamins. In the states of Massachusetts, Michigan, Florida, Oregon and Texas, there are almost half a million such children who take combinations of psychotropic medicines.

"There are a lot of people who are furious that they come for psychiatric help, but receive it in the form of pills," says psychotherapist Dr. Joseph Tarantolo. "They begin to take them, they only get worse, and the problem is even bigger. Then they 'get off' with different drugs, and they get angry at my fellow psychiatrists because of that, but it is absolutely true."*

Tarantolo recognizes that foster parents will increase the dose of psychotropic medicines when they cannot find a common language with the children. For every five foster children, there is one child who Mama or Papa decides to stuff with strong-acting medications.

Susan Waldman adopted Lili from Vietnam, but she considers it a crime to correct her behavior with drugs. "Our family doctor is in favor of a natural approach," she says. "If something hurts, then he tries to treat it with maximum caution. The most he has ever prescribed for my daughter was an antibiotic when she had a severe cold."*

The GAO report says that young patients develop a dependency on psychotropic drugs. The classic case, says the doctor, is that children are adopted, then returned; new parents adopt them and once again they are returned, as if they were a pair of boots that one might take back to the store. So the child is depressed? That means he needs a prescription for an antidepressant.

"We began to think that this was a biological problem, but it is not," says Tarantolo. "These children have a lot of complications in life, but their cause is not their brain, but rather, their way of life. Poverty, broken families, poor educational systems, unhealthy lifestyle, poor nutrition."*

This is a multi-billion-dollar business, explains Tarantolo: It is too profitable to sell the "obedience pills." Even if they have to pay compensation to families, the costs to the pharmaceutical companies would be negligible.

"I cannot understand what doctors are thinking!" says a perplexed Waldman. "When three, four, six, seven types of medicine are prescribed for a seven-year-old child, I can't even comment! It's senseless!"*

The final scandal: The GAO requested that the Department of Health and Human Services increase oversight of medical care for minors. The GAO came to the conclusion that foster mothers and fathers use such radical means to solve problems connected with rearing, rather than with health. The only desire of the confused parents is to quiet the children who they think, for whatever reason, are too active or too violent. In some American families, giving a child psychotropic medicine is a routine pedagogical method, even in cases where the child is less than one year old.

*Editor’s Note: The quotations in this article, accurately translated, could not be verified.