“He was a beautiful child”

By Patrick D HahnJuly 25, 2016

A mania for drugging children: Part 1: “A beautiful child”

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That’s how Anne, a nurse by trade, remembers her eldest son, William. “He laughed a lot,” she recalls. “He liked to have fun. He played the piano beautifully.” He was fascinated by fire engines, and Anne used to take the boy to the local fire house for visits. The fire captain told Anne “Your son can roll up the fire hose better than some of my firemen.”

He also was high energy. When he was five years old, he received a pair of roller blades for Christmas, and he put them on and went outside and practiced until the sun went down. “He was a fantastic roller-blader before the day was over,” Anne says. Night after night, the boy would run around the house in circles to burn off some of that excess energy. But when Anne’s mother witnessed this behavior, she became concerned for her grandson. “He has anxiety,” Anne’s mother told her. “You need to take him to the doctor.” Anne protested “Mom, all they’re going to do is give him medication,” and her mother replied, “Well, then that’s what they need to do. You need to have him evaluated.” Anne consulted with both her son’s teacher and the school headmaster, both of whom opined that there was nothing wrong with the boy. “But I was very eager to please my mother,” Anne says. She took her son to a clinical social worker who told Anne the boy had ADHD. Over the next five years, William was prescribed a variety of ADHD medications, including Ritalin, Adderall, and Dexedrine, along with the antidepressant Elavil, and for a short time, Zoloft.

The results were disastrous. Her child would appear perfectly normal all day long, Anne recalls, but when she picked him up at school his behavior would change instantly. “He would just explode. He would start pointing his finger at me and yelling at me. I would just be so dumbfounded that a little boy in a five- and six-year-old body could be attacking me.” Anne never connected the change in her son’s behavior with the medications. “I medicated the heck out of him,” she says ruefully. “The poor child. I mean I look back and just go, What were we doing? “You’re so frightened your child is going to misbehave that you’re just feeding them these pills just as fast and as hard as you can and you don’t want the time to get away from you because you’re afraid they’re going to blow up and explode. Well, they do, because it’s just like a heroin addict without their heroin. They do explode. You don’t give them what their body’s been getting, and they have a reaction.” When her son was ten, Anne read the book The Bipolar Child by Demetri Papolos, M.D., and Janice Papolos. “They described my child to a T. I just remember highlighting so many things in that book and crying and thinking ‘Oh my gosh – my son has bipolar!”

Anne took her son to an ADHD clinic and asked her to prescribe Depakote for the boy. “I’ve got a book now telling me what to do and how to go to my doctor and say this is what I need, and I was insistent.” After a fifteen-minute consultation, the doctor dispensed the prescription for Depakote, as requested. At the same time, all his other medications were discontinued. “It was horrible,” Anne recalls. “He became a zombie.” Other times, the boy would undergo meltdowns, screaming and crying at the smallest provocation. But the worst was yet to come. Next: Part 2: “Periodic and circular insanity”

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Patrick D Hahn——Bio and Archives

Patrick D Hahn is the author of Prescription for Sorrow: Antidepressants, Suicide, and Violence (Samizdat Health Writer’s Cooperative) and Madness and Genetic Determinism: Is Mental Illness in Our Genes? (Palgrave MacMillan). Dr. Hahn is an Affiliate Professor of Biology at Loyola University Maryland.