Exposing the Increase in the Psychiatric Drugging of Infants and Toddlers

SACRAMENTO, Calif., July 10, 2019 (Newswire.com) - “We believe that the psychiatric drugging of kids is a crime,” said Jim Van Hill, director of Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) Sacramento. “We used the 4th of July weekend to celebrate and promote freedom—freedom for children from this harmful practice. Freedom from interventions and forced treatments of psychiatry. Our purpose is to bring psychiatry under the laws we are all guided by in a humane society.”

Psychiatric drugging of children has increased sharply despite black box warnings, prompting CCHR to call for an investigation. According to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics database for 2013, 274,000 infants and 370,000 toddlers in the U.S. are on antianxiety and antidepressant drugs. This report also found over 1,400 infants were on ADHD drugs.

Van Hill sited Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, who said, “There are not any good scientific data to support the widespread use of these medicines in children, particularly in young children where the scientific data are even more scarce.” 

Why are more and more parents and doctors resorting to drugging children? The New York Times interviewed a dozen experts in child psychiatry and neurology, and they said they had never heard of a child younger than 3 receiving such medication, and struggled to explain it.

Dr. Claudia M. Gold, M.D., believes “Mental Health Disorder are big words to put on a small person… Based on my years of clinical experience as a pediatrician, together with evidence offered by contemporary research in developmental psychology, genetics and neuroscience, I believe that supporting parents’ efforts to understand their young child’s experience of the world, to help him or her to make sense of whatever particular vulnerabilities he or she has, without labeling him or her with a disorder, is a better approach.”

According to Dr. Thomas Dorman, internist and member of the Royal College of Physicians of the UK and fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada, “the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of ‘disease,’ formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough.”

Van Hill’s work to bring psychiatry under the law and protect California’s foster children from forced psychiatric drugging is featured in an episode of Voices for Humanity on the Scientology Network.

Citizens Commission on Human Rights is a nonprofit charitable mental health watchdog cofounded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and professor of psychiatry Dr. Thomas Szasz. It is dedicated to eradicating psychiatric abuse and ensuring patient protection.

With headquarters in Los Angeles, California, CCHR International guides a global human rights advocacy network of some 180 chapters across 34 nations. CCHR Commissioners include physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, lawyers, legislators, government officials, educators and civil rights representatives.

Source: Citizens Commission on Human Rights