This is making me rethink going into child psych...

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Read what I wrote in the thread where the 4 y.o. ODd on meds given by her psychiatrist.

Too many doctors are too liberally giving out psyche meds. Several people are wanting to med up their kids for the wrong reasons.

I completely believe that ADHD, childhood bipolar, depression, psychosis etc are real diseases, and medication of child patients with these disorders can be beneficial. However, I also believe that several parents & teachers are just wanting to med the kids because they find it the easier thng to do.

There's no real way IMHO for a doc to find out if every, or at least a majority child truly is justified to take meds. All you got is what the parents & teachers tell you and often times they have an agenda.

Like I brought up, several kids in those nanny shows just needed someone to watch them critically for several days to see the problem. While I know Nanny 9-1-1 and SuperNanny certainly aren't science, I did see similar programs as a psychology major that were scientifically done.

Similar kids would probably have just been drugged up by a psychiatrist.

If you ask me, a social worker, nurse practicioner or something of the like (a trained person) should watch the parents with the kids every day for a week from wake to sleep and record what was going on. That's one of the only ways a psychiatrist will be able to get a REAL and objective way to gauge the patient.
 
There is no doubt that alot of kids are overmedicated by psychiatrists on rare occasions, and by primary care/peds more often, and at the insistence of teachers, foster parents etc...
 
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and by primary care/peds more often, and at the insistence of teachers, foster parents etc...

My experience is that this is very true. When kids come into the child psych service at my med. school, they are often on multiple meds from their PCP. We often spend a large amount of effort knocking down those meds and starting the kids on therapy and getting them plugged into support services.
 
this video makes me sick.
it is aweful that kids get overmedicated but it is also aweful that people are creating propaganda against psychiatry and psych meds.
i am dedicated to a career in psychiatry, but this kind of think freaks me out.
the psychtruth wedsite sponsoring this is a group of psychologists who are against ALL psychmeds.
it would be absurd for me to be on insulin b/c i don't have diabetes but some people need it. the stigma of psychiatry and mental illness in general is so frustrating. ugh. such closemindedness!
 
Psychtruth.org is ran by 2 psychologists, but the advisory panel is at least 1/2 psychiatrists. I agree with you about hating this kind of propaganda.
 
Regardless of whether this video was created for anti-psych med propaganda purposes or not, it was composed entirely of patients' own words about their experiences with psychiatry, and thus worthy of our attention. I found it very thought provoking.
 
Its a shame that there's a war going on between psychiatrists vs psychologists vs scientologists.

The goal should be the best treatment possible for the patient, using the least amount of meds possible.

While I hate the propaganda given out by scientology, there is some truth to it, though exagerated, but yes there are a bunch of lazy psychiatrists out there that'll dump meds on anyone.

As most of us know, this is due to laziness and every field has its fair share of lazy idiots. Just as much as I remember idiot Ob-gyn docs not doing everything in the standard of care, surgeons, IM docs, teaching docs that don't teach etc.

Scientology bends it to make it as if the entire field is bad.

If anything, objective, good intentioned doctors should use this to further instill to critically evaluate a diagnosis and to always reconsider if meds should or should not be used.
 
I miss how psychologists are in this propaganda war?? Sure there are some *****s out there like in any field, but the profession is based in EBM more than most specialities....
 
What we are not seeing in this video is why the kids have been placed on meds. I did a rotation with a child psychiatrist who worked for the state. Every med that he prescribed was aimed to address an unwanted behavior. I bet you not all of these kids are perfectly innocent and that some of them have been placed on meds for behaviors such as aggression and violence towards others.
 
What we are not seeing in this video is why the kids have been placed on meds. I did a rotation with a child psychiatrist who worked for the state. Every med that he prescribed was aimed to address an unwanted behavior. I bet you not all of these kids are perfectly innocent and that some of them have been placed on meds for behaviors such as aggression and violence towards others.

I had the same thought. We missed the part where they started the cutting behavior and assaultiveness toward peers and staff in school...
 
I have no idea if psychology was somehow involved with the above video, but I believe a lot of psychiatrists are up at arms against psychologists over the power to prescribe meds issue.

You know from my past posts that I have nothing against psychologists. If anything IMHO, psychologists getting prescribing power is more from a shortage of psychiatrists that psychiatry should be addressing, but does not seem to be doing so. Instead psychiatry seems to have focused on locking horns against psychology from getting this power.
 
I went from working with high risk kids to very affluent kids -- geographic change, nothing more -- and saw both sides of it: HRY who needed and didn't get meds, and over-medicated affluent kids.

The questions involved are far deeper than medicine can answer, they're systemic and involve access to appropriate care, etc. In my own opinionated opinion about this, the best anyone here can do is be mindful of the problem and give the best care to all pts.

Signed,
Pollyanna?

Oh, yeah, and my final opinion is distrust of medication as first line tx of anyone who hasn't yet reached puberty. Check the parents, and if you don't have time to do an adequate hx, don't do anything your pt might regret...
 
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