Your Child’s Brain on Antipsychotics. Any Questions?

[1:13]

“From 2005 to 2011, prescribing trends in the military showed a steady and vast increase in the use of antipsychotics, anxiolytics, and anticonvulsants in a manner that is outside the usual bounds of accepted medical or psychiatric practice. Prescribing of multiple psychoactive drugs per individual increased nearly 700%. Increase in stimulant prescribing outpaced that of any other class of drug, increasing fifteen-fold. Prescriptions for antipsychotics increased 1083% for active-duty troops from 2005-2011. The primary indications for antipsychotic drugs are the treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and severe major depression. Since the military screens out prospective enlistees for these disorders, the use of these powerful drugs is clearly off-label. A psychiatrist at the Department of Defense acknowledged that insomnia, aggressive behavior, and anxiety have been treated by the military with antipsychotics. At the same time, the use of antidepressants – the drugs demonstrated to have the greatest efficacy for depression — dropped 48% between 2006 and 2009.” http://bit.ly/2bdFMgK

“The rationale behind such treatment is not difficult to understand. Maintaining troop strength in a long and expensive war is no easy feat. In the absence of a draft, the Bush administration initiated “stop-loss” policies designed to keep boots on the ground, such as the automatic extension of soldiers’ tours of duty. Yet the high-profile (and heavily criticized) deployment extensions were only one of the efforts to stem attrition in the military; off-label uses of psychoactive drugs were another. Offering antipsychotics, sedatives, and sedating mood stabilizers to soldiers who had been recently traumatized could help ensure that such individuals slept through the night, and that they would be able to report for duty the following day. Soldiers made drowsy by the off-label cocktail could be revived with a stimulant. By contrast, the antidepressants clinically approved for treating PTSD could take several weeks to show an effect. Evidence gathered by Friedman has suggested that the application of sedatives and stimulants might be difficult to resist given the slow-acting alternatives, and that it has been administered quite often.”

[Source: Our Amazing World YouTube link]