Remember all those wonderful fairy tales in which the idea was to find the prince among all of the frogs? There's a new twist on that. Children who have difficulty in preschool and elementary school are now being diagnosed as Bipolar. It's the hottest new diagnosis among children.
What's that got to do with kissing frogs? In a moment, I'll explain.
For the last twenty-five years, disruptive American children have been labeled with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Ritalin was the most common medication prescribed for this disorder. Its major side effects included changes in the child's weight and sleeping patterns -- and possible addiction. It became a very controversial medication. In controlled studies, when cocaine addicts were given ritalin, they often couldn't distinguish it from cocaine.
Disruptive children in other nations across the world were seldom treated with Ritalin. More than ninety percent of all prescriptions for Ritalin were for American children.
Now hundreds of thousands of toddlers and young children are taking lithium, other "mood stabilizers," and anti-psychotics to treat their supposed Bipolar disorder. Are parents informed that the most common side effects of anti-psychotics are movement disorders? Unfortunately, that information is not usually provided.
In adults, these movement disorders usually involve involuntary jerky movements that can sometimes resemble Parkinson's Disease. The most common movement disorder, Tardive Dyskinesia (TD) starts with the tongue. An adult begins to mimic a frog.
Frogs propel their sticky tongues into the air in order to snare flying insects for their meals. Adults and children with TD parody this part of a frogs life. It's not something someone with TD has any control over. It can be very embarrassing and frustrating.
That's only the first stage of this movement disorder. If the medication isn't stopped when this symptom occurs, grotesque changes in gait can occur. At the later stages, a person begins to move like a startled chicken. Life is basically over at this stage. Patients remain in group homes and/or locked units of nursing homes. Psychiatry doesn't want this malady viewed in public.
Children who acquire TD, don't get to the startled chicken stage. For them, such muscle rigidity occurs that they can barely move. And now so many toddlers and young children have been exposed to this dangerous complication that in the next decade there may well be an epidemic of movement disorders among children. Will that show up on morbidity and mortality reports. Movement disorders in adults are not tracked like other diseases.
That might result in psychopharmaceuticals losing their treasured position in the stock market, where these drugs are among the most stable of medical stocks and bonds. They usually also produce a twenty percent profit. Is that more important to America than the health of its children?
For details about movement disorders and other forms of psychiatric abuse, read Games Therapists Play, by Janet Saugstad, Universal Publishers, 2005 and Toxic Psychiatry, by Peter Breggin, MD, St, Martins Press, NY 1990. Both books are available at amazon.com
