ListenNEBRASKA
Foster kids need care, not drugs
When Gwen Howard, a social worker, was elected to the Nebraska Legislature, one of her first bills in 2005 called for a committee to find out to what extent state wards are prescribed behavior-modifying medication. Howard had noticed the trend of foster children taking multiple psychotropic drugs in the late 1990s.
She proposed such a measure again in 2007, and then in 2012 her bill was incorporated into the child welfare measures passed by the Legislature. A committee of the newly formed Children’s Commission is supposed to make recommendations to the governor and Legislature by Dec. 15 of this year.
The action is better late than never and comes on the heels of congressional action.
Congress passed the Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act in September that required states to develop protocols for use of psychotropic drugs for foster kids. The Government Accountability Office last fall also urged that Health and Human Services create nationwide guidelines for oversight.
Nebraska’s HHS is planning additional training to improve oversight and has implemented minimum age limits on use of some psychotropic medications, spokesman Russ Reno said.
Dr. Kayla Pope, a Boys Town National Research Hospital child and adolescent psychiatrist and an attorney, gave a lecture recently on the need for more pushback on medicating children. Pope said evidence was lacking that antipsychotic drugs were therapeutic for kids.
A staggering 22.5 percent of Nebraska’s foster children were taking psychiatric drugs in 2010. A Tufts University study put the number of kids in the general population taking such medications at about 4 percent.
Certainly, foster children have gone through more trauma after being removed from unsafe homes, but the resulting aggression/behavior problems often are better controlled through other means, Pope noted. She said it works well to get the kids involved in sports. Nebraska also needs more funding for behavioral mental health treatment and to make it the first option -– not psychiatric medications -- she said.
At the hearing on her bill, Howard said: “Although medications can be helpful to treat mental disorders, they often have serious side effects that can range from decreased appetite, weight gain, nightmares to irreversible tics, seizures and thoughts of suicide. It's a way to control behaviors with children who come into the foster care system and have a lot of emotions. And, quite frankly, they're entitled to feel frustrated, lost, scared, angry, hurt, anything you can imagine.”
Over and over, experts and those in the system reiterate that what these children most need is stability, not drugs.
Many of the children Howard saw with multiple prescriptions in the late 1990s now are adults. We urge the Children’s Commission to act quickly but thoroughly in its work so that Nebraska ensures that as few children as possible in the state’s care will grow up drugged.
Editorial
2 June 2012
