As bipolar diagnoses in foster children rise, informed consent becomes a bygone-Chicago Tribune:
"Powerful mood-altering drugs were prescribed to hundreds of Illinois foster children without the required consent of state child welfare officials, a Tribune analysis of government data has found.
And increasing numbers of young wards were diagnosed with bipolar disorder and given a class of anti-psychotic medicines that some physicians consider risky for youths because they can cause such side effects as metabolic abnormalities and pronounced weight gain.
The number of Illinois wards diagnosed with bipolar disorder nearly doubled between 2000 and 2007, when roughly 9 percent of the state's nearly 16,000 wards were diagnosed as bipolar, the Tribune found."-Chicago Tribune
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SO many of the children who were patients with my daughter in 1999 until the present were foster kids. i witnessed these children who were alone and drugged up zombies being bounced from hospitals to RTC's cry and plead for a parent to love them. this story does not only break my heart, it is a reminder of one of my goals one doctor begged of me per my advocacy:
"don't forget the foster kids".
by age 18 they are on their own , and attempting to navigate this world with mental illness labels, inpatient stays and drugs that never should have been prescribed to them.
Via Stan's blog.
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2 comments:
It's sad, but many of the other children we saw when my daughter was hospitalized were foster kids. Now when we go to the county mental health office I would say most of the kids are foster kids, just from the things I hear while waiting when my daughter has her therapy sessions, or while we wait to see the psychiatrist. Awhile back I wrote about one foster mom who was discussing with an employee of that office if her foster son didn't have the proper testing so she would 'know what she was getting into', she was going to have the testing done elsewhere. Some people shouldn't be foster parents.
The last time I was there for my daughter's therapy session I overheard another foster parent complain that 2 of her 3 foster kids had a diagnosis of bipolar and she said she was sure 1 of them was definitely not bipolar, but was having difficulty getting a proper diagnosis.
This makes me ill. We were foster parents for a while and the foster care system in America is gross and broken. The abuse these kids have to endure in the system after having been removed from their homes for, ironically, abuse and neglect is shameful. If a country is judged on how it treats it's most vulnerable members then we as a nation are failing for sure.
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