Time has an article on “Medicating Young Minds.” Since we were able to move beyond putting alcohol in baby bottles, perhaps, in the not so distant future, we will find a way to accept our children without wanting to drug them all the time. I have found some school officials seem to jump at the chance to label a kid and start drug therapy.
Jeffrey Kluger writes (excerpt):
Within the medical community—to say nothing of the families of the troubled kids—concern is growing about just what psychotropic drugs can do to still developing brains. Few people deny that mind pills help—ask the untold numbers who have climbed out of depressive pits or shaken off bipolar fits thanks to modern pharmacology. But few deny either that we’re a quick-fix culture, and if you give us a feel-good answer to a complicated problem, we’ll use it with little thought of long-term consequences.
“The problem,” warns Dr. Glen Elliott, director of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute’s children’s center at the University of California, San Francisco, “is that our usage has outstripped our knowledge base. Let’s face it, we’re experimenting on these kids without tracking the results.”