Preston - Fighting for Kids

[Guest guest]

http://tinyurl.com/79hle

The Huffington Post

06.02.2005

Preston

Fighting for Kids

As a parent, I am deeply concerned over the escalating number of American

children who have been placed on mind-altering psychiatric drugs over the last

decade because of being labeled with subjective, non-medical mental disorders,

like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Hyperactivity Disorder

(ADHD). All too often, parents are told that their child has a mental disorder

and that this is a medical condition requiring that they be put on drugs. This

is fraudulent. There are no blood tests, brain scans or " chemical imbalance "

tests that can prove that any of these so called mental disorders are a disease,

illness or medical condition. No such tests exist. These " tests " are simply a

checklist of behaviors -- subjective questionnaires -- to determine if these

children have so-called mental illnesses. Some of these questions are: does the

child fidget, squirm in his seat, or stare out the window? Does he sometimes

lose his homework, pencils or toys?

Where in all of medicine is a diagnosis of disease made strictly by talking to

someone? Would a parents subject their child to chemotherapy if there were no

evidence of cancer cells? Would they take a doctor's word for it that he could

diagnose their child with cancer simply by asking the child some questions or

observing his behavior? Yet parents are being told that their child has a mental

" disease " and that they need to take dangerous and unproven drugs -- when there

is no medical proof that anything is wrong with the child.

I have spoken out for parent's rights for the last seven years. Two years ago I

worked to garner national support for the federal Child Medication Safety Act,

which passed the U.S. House of Representatives by a landslide vote of 425 to 1,

and was signed into federal law by President Bush in December 2004, as

the Prohibition Mandatory Medication Amendment. The federal bill required that

federal funding be withheld from any school that coerced parents to drug their

children with controlled substances. That is also why I supported Florida House

Bill 209 which took the federal amendment several steps further by preventing

any student from being coerced onto any psychotropic drug in schools and

requiring parents be informed that their child's problematic behavior may have

physical causes that could be treated with actual medical care -- as opposed to

potentially damaging mind control drugs. Both SB 1090 and HB 209, a similar

bill, were passed unanimously by both the Florida House and the Florida Senate.

However, Governor Bush chose to veto HB 209 and sign only SB 1090, which did not

include informing parents that their child's behavior could be the result of an

undiagnosed physical condition. While Governor Bush vetoed HB 209, the passage

of SB 1090, as recognized by the Governor in his statement, does mark forward

progress in addressing this serious problem. Governor Bush said: " I share the

concerns of many of the proponents of this bill (HB 209) who draw attention to

the all too frequent use of pharmaceuticals for children whose health and

behavioral problems may benefit from other forms of intervention. Further, I am

a firm supporter of parental notification in all types of medical care provided

to children. " Now that Senate Bill 1090 is law, safeguards have been created for

parents in Florida that prevent them from being coerced to put their children on

dangerous psychotropic drugs or from being psychologically evaluated -- simply,

parents now have the right to refuse psychiatric testing with invasive

questionnaires that could easily result in any child being diagnosed mentally

" ill " and subsequently drugged. I want to thank Florida Senators Skip

and Victor Crist, and Representative Gus Barreiro, for their courageous efforts

in bringing the urgent problem of psychiatric drugging of children to the

forefront of the Florida Legislature. Through their efforts, the problem was

also spotlighted onto the national scene.

I will continue to work with other concerned groups and legislators to find

legislative measures that will not just prevent parents being forced to put

their children on psychotropic drugs, as this new law now does, but to ensure

that parents are fully informed of the dangers of psychotropic drugging and

alternative solutions, including actual medical examination and non-harmful

treatments to resolve underlying conditions for the child's behavior (an

important section of HB 209). Parents are the ones who have the right, the duty

and the responsibility to nurture, care and protect their children. They should

not be coerced in any manner to place their children on psychiatric drugs. They

should also be given all the relevant information so they can make their own

informed decision, not just the information coming from the industry that

benefits from the drugging of children. Child drugging is over a one billion

dollar a year industry, and growing. Parents need to know that there are

alternatives to drugging. It is ridiculous that here in America, citizens have

to fight for laws that protect a parent's fundamental right to informed consent

so they can fully protect their children and ensure their safety in schools. But

fight we must.

Today we have 10 million children on psychiatric drugs. Side effects of these

drugs include mania, psychosis, hostility, suicide and drug dependence. The

administration of these mind-altering and dangerous drugs to children has become

a national disgrace. If we keep drugging our children at this rate, in ten years

we will have 40 million children on psychiatric drugs -- that's almost 4/5ths of

our nations school children. Parents are risking their child's life with drugs

that can cause future drug addiction, mania, suicide, psychosis and violence.

Medical studies show that children can suffer not only from allergies, but from

chemical toxicities or exposure to heavy metals (i.e. lead and mercury) or even

poor diet. In 2002, the President's Commission on Excellence in Special

Education found an astounding 2.4 million children who had been labeled with

" learning disorders " when they had never been taught to read. Another study

showed that 50% of the students labeled with a " learning disability " were just

not getting enough sleep. The point is that there are many solutions to handling

a child's academic difficulties or behaviors. Parents have the right to know

their options -- to consult a medical doctor to discover if there are real

physical causes, and to be informed that that these labels of mental disorders

are created by questionnaires and not medical tests. I know that there are

concerned parents out there who are concerned about this issue. I have heard

from many of them. I encourage all concerned with protecting parental rights to

join me in letting our legislators know that they must not just notice that

there is a problem, they must do something effective to handle it.

FACTS:

The number of children on psychotropic drugs has increased by 500% since 1999.

8 of the last 13 school shootings in America were committed by children under

the influence of psychiatric drugs linked to hostility and suicide.

Many children have committed suicide as a result of psychiatric drugs. One study

shows that 81% of the child suicides in Pinellas County, Florida were committed

by children who were either on these psychotropic drugs or under psychiatric

treatment. It was 100% in Pasco County. Last year, the FDA ordered that

antidepressants include a warning that they can cause suicidal tendencies in

children and adolescents. British and European Medical Regulatory Agencies

banned the use of many of these drugs for most purposes with children under the

age of 18.

According to an IMS Health survey, between 1995 and 1999, the use of

antidepressants increased 580 percent in children under the age of six.

It is undisputed that actual physical, medical problems are routinely

misdiagnosed as ADHD, ADD, and other " behavioral disorders. " Parents and

teachers are not being informed that the reason for their child's behavior may

just lay in an actual, diagnosable, physical medical problem that could be

solved through normal medical treatment. Consider the case of Austin from

Florida who was hailed as " the poster child for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity

Disorder " (ADHD). He was the child no one wanted to be around and was kicked out

of 11 preschools in three years for doing everything from shouting obscenities

and hitting other children to poking a teacher in the eye with a pencil. He was

prescribed stimulants with no dramatic change in his behavior. But something

unexpected happened after Austin went to the hospital to have a blockage removed

from his colon. The child no one wanted to be around was no longer terrorizing

his teachers and classmates. Instead, Austin, who is now 12, was able to sit

quietly and was a joy to be around. He gave up the psychotropic medication.

According to leading medical experts, the connection between behavior and

chronic constipation in children is not uncommon. " The bad behaviors disappear

as soon as the impaction is removed, " said Dr. Hyman, chief of pediatric

gastroenterology at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City.

There is a world of difference between the art of identifying symptoms and the

science of finding and treating causes. Psychiatrists specialize in cataloguing

symptoms and then try to convince people that the symptoms are causes and that

their treatments " work, " merely because the symptoms appear to have dissipated

or changed. But these are not causes, they are just symptoms, and their

treatments often bring about a worsening of the person's condition. Any medical

doctor who takes the time to conduct a thorough physical examination of a child

exhibiting signs of what psychiatrists say are " mental disorders, " can very

often find undiagnosed, untreated physical conditions. Medical doctors have

established that mercury poisoning, environmental toxins and allergies can

affect behavior and academic performance and can create symptoms, which have

been labeled as childhood behavioral and attention " disorders. " Gases, cleaning

fluids, scents and other chemicals can make a child " irritable, inattentive,

spacey, aggressive, depressed or hyperactive. " Physical conditions such as

thyroid malfunction can produce symptoms of various " mental disorders. " It is

well known that abnormal thyroid conditions can dramatically effect mood and

cause severe depression, fatigue and memory loss. Dr. Sydney III, a

psychiatrist and neurologist wrote that thousands of children put on psychiatric

drugs are simply " smart. " " They're hyper, not because their brains don't work

right, but because they spend most of the day waiting for slower students to

catch up with them. These students are bored to tears, and people who are bored

fidget, wiggle, scratch, stretch, and (especially if they are boys) start

looking for ways to get into trouble. " Dr. Blumenfeld, educator and

author, says that psychotropic drugs for any reading or comprehension problem is

very wrong. Often, he says, the problem is the child has never been taught

phonics and doesn't understand what he or she is reading, causing disruptive

behavior. Again, I encourage all parents and concerned citizens to get educated

on this very important issue and to support state and federal protections for

parents' and children's rights. For more information, go to www.fightforkids.org

[Guest guest]

http://tinyurl.com/79hle

The Huffington Post

06.02.2005

Preston

Fighting for Kids

As a parent, I am deeply concerned over the escalating number of American

children who have been placed on mind-altering psychiatric drugs over the last

decade because of being labeled with subjective, non-medical mental disorders,

like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Hyperactivity Disorder

(ADHD). All too often, parents are told that their child has a mental disorder

and that this is a medical condition requiring that they be put on drugs. This

is fraudulent. There are no blood tests, brain scans or " chemical imbalance "

tests that can prove that any of these so called mental disorders are a disease,

illness or medical condition. No such tests exist. These " tests " are simply a

checklist of behaviors -- subjective questionnaires -- to determine if these

children have so-called mental illnesses. Some of these questions are: does the

child fidget, squirm in his seat, or stare out the window? Does he sometimes

lose his homework, pencils or toys?

Where in all of medicine is a diagnosis of disease made strictly by talking to

someone? Would a parents subject their child to chemotherapy if there were no

evidence of cancer cells? Would they take a doctor's word for it that he could

diagnose their child with cancer simply by asking the child some questions or

observing his behavior? Yet parents are being told that their child has a mental

" disease " and that they need to take dangerous and unproven drugs -- when there

is no medical proof that anything is wrong with the child.

I have spoken out for parent's rights for the last seven years. Two years ago I

worked to garner national support for the federal Child Medication Safety Act,

which passed the U.S. House of Representatives by a landslide vote of 425 to 1,

and was signed into federal law by President Bush in December 2004, as

the Prohibition Mandatory Medication Amendment. The federal bill required that

federal funding be withheld from any school that coerced parents to drug their

children with controlled substances. That is also why I supported Florida House

Bill 209 which took the federal amendment several steps further by preventing

any student from being coerced onto any psychotropic drug in schools and

requiring parents be informed that their child's problematic behavior may have

physical causes that could be treated with actual medical care -- as opposed to

potentially damaging mind control drugs. Both SB 1090 and HB 209, a similar

bill, were passed unanimously by both the Florida House and the Florida Senate.

However, Governor Bush chose to veto HB 209 and sign only SB 1090, which did not

include informing parents that their child's behavior could be the result of an

undiagnosed physical condition. While Governor Bush vetoed HB 209, the passage

of SB 1090, as recognized by the Governor in his statement, does mark forward

progress in addressing this serious problem. Governor Bush said: " I share the

concerns of many of the proponents of this bill (HB 209) who draw attention to

the all too frequent use of pharmaceuticals for children whose health and

behavioral problems may benefit from other forms of intervention. Further, I am

a firm supporter of parental notification in all types of medical care provided

to children. " Now that Senate Bill 1090 is law, safeguards have been created for

parents in Florida that prevent them from being coerced to put their children on

dangerous psychotropic drugs or from being psychologically evaluated -- simply,

parents now have the right to refuse psychiatric testing with invasive

questionnaires that could easily result in any child being diagnosed mentally

" ill " and subsequently drugged. I want to thank Florida Senators Skip

and Victor Crist, and Representative Gus Barreiro, for their courageous efforts

in bringing the urgent problem of psychiatric drugging of children to the

forefront of the Florida Legislature. Through their efforts, the problem was

also spotlighted onto the national scene.

I will continue to work with other concerned groups and legislators to find

legislative measures that will not just prevent parents being forced to put

their children on psychotropic drugs, as this new law now does, but to ensure

that parents are fully informed of the dangers of psychotropic drugging and

alternative solutions, including actual medical examination and non-harmful

treatments to resolve underlying conditions for the child's behavior (an

important section of HB 209). Parents are the ones who have the right, the duty

and the responsibility to nurture, care and protect their children. They should

not be coerced in any manner to place their children on psychiatric drugs. They

should also be given all the relevant information so they can make their own

informed decision, not just the information coming from the industry that

benefits from the drugging of children. Child drugging is over a one billion

dollar a year industry, and growing. Parents need to know that there are

alternatives to drugging. It is ridiculous that here in America, citizens have

to fight for laws that protect a parent's fundamental right to informed consent

so they can fully protect their children and ensure their safety in schools. But

fight we must.

Today we have 10 million children on psychiatric drugs. Side effects of these

drugs include mania, psychosis, hostility, suicide and drug dependence. The

administration of these mind-altering and dangerous drugs to children has become

a national disgrace. If we keep drugging our children at this rate, in ten years

we will have 40 million children on psychiatric drugs -- that's almost 4/5ths of

our nations school children. Parents are risking their child's life with drugs

that can cause future drug addiction, mania, suicide, psychosis and violence.

Medical studies show that children can suffer not only from allergies, but from

chemical toxicities or exposure to heavy metals (i.e. lead and mercury) or even

poor diet. In 2002, the President's Commission on Excellence in Special

Education found an astounding 2.4 million children who had been labeled with

" learning disorders " when they had never been taught to read. Another study

showed that 50% of the students labeled with a " learning disability " were just

not getting enough sleep. The point is that there are many solutions to handling

a child's academic difficulties or behaviors. Parents have the right to know

their options -- to consult a medical doctor to discover if there are real

physical causes, and to be informed that that these labels of mental disorders

are created by questionnaires and not medical tests. I know that there are

concerned parents out there who are concerned about this issue. I have heard

from many of them. I encourage all concerned with protecting parental rights to

join me in letting our legislators know that they must not just notice that

there is a problem, they must do something effective to handle it.

FACTS:

The number of children on psychotropic drugs has increased by 500% since 1999.

8 of the last 13 school shootings in America were committed by children under

the influence of psychiatric drugs linked to hostility and suicide.

Many children have committed suicide as a result of psychiatric drugs. One study

shows that 81% of the child suicides in Pinellas County, Florida were committed

by children who were either on these psychotropic drugs or under psychiatric

treatment. It was 100% in Pasco County. Last year, the FDA ordered that

antidepressants include a warning that they can cause suicidal tendencies in

children and adolescents. British and European Medical Regulatory Agencies

banned the use of many of these drugs for most purposes with children under the

age of 18.

According to an IMS Health survey, between 1995 and 1999, the use of

antidepressants increased 580 percent in children under the age of six.

It is undisputed that actual physical, medical problems are routinely

misdiagnosed as ADHD, ADD, and other " behavioral disorders. " Parents and

teachers are not being informed that the reason for their child's behavior may

just lay in an actual, diagnosable, physical medical problem that could be

solved through normal medical treatment. Consider the case of Austin from

Florida who was hailed as " the poster child for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity

Disorder " (ADHD). He was the child no one wanted to be around and was kicked out

of 11 preschools in three years for doing everything from shouting obscenities

and hitting other children to poking a teacher in the eye with a pencil. He was

prescribed stimulants with no dramatic change in his behavior. But something

unexpected happened after Austin went to the hospital to have a blockage removed

from his colon. The child no one wanted to be around was no longer terrorizing

his teachers and classmates. Instead, Austin, who is now 12, was able to sit

quietly and was a joy to be around. He gave up the psychotropic medication.

According to leading medical experts, the connection between behavior and

chronic constipation in children is not uncommon. " The bad behaviors disappear

as soon as the impaction is removed, " said Dr. Hyman, chief of pediatric

gastroenterology at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City.

There is a world of difference between the art of identifying symptoms and the

science of finding and treating causes. Psychiatrists specialize in cataloguing

symptoms and then try to convince people that the symptoms are causes and that

their treatments " work, " merely because the symptoms appear to have dissipated

or changed. But these are not causes, they are just symptoms, and their

treatments often bring about a worsening of the person's condition. Any medical

doctor who takes the time to conduct a thorough physical examination of a child

exhibiting signs of what psychiatrists say are " mental disorders, " can very

often find undiagnosed, untreated physical conditions. Medical doctors have

established that mercury poisoning, environmental toxins and allergies can

affect behavior and academic performance and can create symptoms, which have

been labeled as childhood behavioral and attention " disorders. " Gases, cleaning

fluids, scents and other chemicals can make a child " irritable, inattentive,

spacey, aggressive, depressed or hyperactive. " Physical conditions such as

thyroid malfunction can produce symptoms of various " mental disorders. " It is

well known that abnormal thyroid conditions can dramatically effect mood and

cause severe depression, fatigue and memory loss. Dr. Sydney III, a

psychiatrist and neurologist wrote that thousands of children put on psychiatric

drugs are simply " smart. " " They're hyper, not because their brains don't work

right, but because they spend most of the day waiting for slower students to

catch up with them. These students are bored to tears, and people who are bored

fidget, wiggle, scratch, stretch, and (especially if they are boys) start

looking for ways to get into trouble. " Dr. Blumenfeld, educator and

author, says that psychotropic drugs for any reading or comprehension problem is

very wrong. Often, he says, the problem is the child has never been taught

phonics and doesn't understand what he or she is reading, causing disruptive

behavior. Again, I encourage all parents and concerned citizens to get educated

on this very important issue and to support state and federal protections for

parents' and children's rights. For more information, go to www.fightforkids.org