The Citizens Commission on Human Rights filed Freedom of Information Act requests across 32 states to obtain data on psychiatric drug prescribing to children enrolled in Medicaid. They shared that data with me for review. What it contains should prompt serious national conversation.
Medicaid is a federal and state program funded by American taxpayers, designed as a safety net for the country’s most economically vulnerable citizens. In 32 states alone, that safety net spent $1.78 billion prescribing psychiatric “medications” to nearly three million children in a single year. 270,000 of those children were under the age of five.
These are not benign interventions. They are drugs with serious, documented risks prescribed to developing brains during the most sensitive years of human life. Stimulants carry the same DEA addiction classification as OxyContin and fentanyl. Antidepressants carry a black box warning for suicidal behavior in children and adolescents and are associated with permanent neurological and sexual damage that may persist long after the drug is stopped. “Anti-anxiety” drugs including benzodiazepines carry warnings for life-threatening dependence in adults taking them for more than two weeks.
We are giving them to toddlers.