I have another entry im trying to write, about moving overseas, but it is proving harder to write than i thought. In the meantime, i wanted to write about this article:

http://www.furiousseasons.com/archives/2010/01/antipsychotic_use_doubles_in_americas_toddlers.html

"The most commonly-prescribed antipsychotic for toddlers is Risperdal"

RISPERDAL?! Are you fucking serious?! Maybe this scares me because Risperdal fucked me up so badly i wound up in a psych ward, but even without that, it is an extremely potent drug. It slows you down, messes with your moods and memory, makes you feel like your brain is dying. And they're giving this to TODDLERS?!

I was prescribed this for psychotic mania, so its hard for me to imagine what on Earth could be so very wrong with a TWO YEAR OLD that they would need such an extreme drug in their systems. I wonder what is wrong with parents today that they would rather allow their child to be drugged up than allow them to be a child.

Psychotic symptoms in an adult, potentially requiring an antipsychotic to treat them, include:

Hallucinations (seeing things that arent there)- NORMAL for a child

Auditory hallucinations (hearing things that arent there)- NORMAL for a child

Delusions- believing something or some situation to be true when it is not- NORMAL for a child

So basically giving a child this kind of medication is to not allow them to be a child. That literally makes no sense to me. I understand that in some cases there are children who may be extremely poorly and might need to be medicated, but one would think that these cases would be extremely rare, few and far between and not something that would be increasing. It makes me wonder if people these days are so brainwashed by the current culture of "if your kid acts even remotely like a kid they might be mentally ill/ have adhd etc" that they dont even realize that having an imagination is a normal thing for a kid. Its terrifying to think where this kind of thing is going to lead...