U.S. foster children prescribed crushing amounts of psychiatric drugs.

from Huffington Post:

The most vulnerable among us are the littlest victims. Young children, torn from their birth families through various, often unspeakable tragedies. These children end up in state supervised foster care and too often are passed from hand to hand, house to house. There were approximately 662,000 children in foster care in the United States in 2010.

Now there is a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report confirming that foster children in five states -- Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Texas -- are receiving shocking amounts of psychiatric drugs. In the words of ABC News, they are "being prescribed psychiatric medications at doses higher than the maximum levels approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in these five states alone. And hundreds of foster children received five or more psychiatric drugs at the same time despite absolutely no evidence supporting the simultaneous use or safety of this number of psychiatric drugs taken together." The ABC News report shows one 7-year-old holding a bag filled with 13 psychiatric medications that she had taken.

During the FDA drug-approval process, the maximum dose of a drug is determined by giving that drug by itself without any other psychoactive substances. When two or more psychiatric drugs are given together, each at its maximum dose, toxic levels of exposure can occur. In addition, some of these children are being given higher than the FDA-approved dose of individual drugs.

One young child interviewed by ABC News described the effect of the antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs he was taking: "They made me feel like I had a thousand bricks on my head." Another child said, "Some of the medications were for ADHD but I'm not ADHD, I'm just naughty." A teen in foster care on multiple psychiatric drugs told ABC News she felt like a "guinea pig."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/foster-children_b_1149805.html
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