The number of prescriptions for antidepressants and other mind-altering drugs given to children under 16 has more than quadrupled in the last decade, according to official figures released today.The article goes on to quote David Laws MP questioning why so many prescriptions are given instead of searching for the root causes of the various problems.There were more than 631,000 such prescriptions recorded in the last financial year, according to government figures, compared to 146,000 in 1996-97.
The prescriptions, for drugs including antidepressants and treatments for mental health problems as well as for conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder were dispensed outside hospitals in England. Figures from 2000 include prescriptions made out by dispensing GPs.
My own answer to this would be to say 'follow the money'. The pharmaceutical corporations have a vested interest in keeping us popping pills. Also, knowing how our own kids have reacted to various food chemicals, I would suspect that diet is one of the reasons for problems like depression and ADHD. But again, the big corporations don't want us to think that and will throw a lot of money to keep us from thinking that.
2 comments:
Actually, if you check the table I have produced from the Government's data, you can see that the use of antidepressants is "only" up by a factor of 1.4. The real story is in the increased use of behaviour control drugs over the last decade - almost ten-fold among under-16s and almost twenty-fold among 16-18 year olds in full-time education! See The Difference: Our Orwellian State
Thanks for this further clarification John. I am not surprised. We have seen diet affect behaviour in a negative way in our own sons. It is now widely known that many artificial food additives impact ADHD - particularly tartrazine and its relatives. However ours and many people's experience is that a wide range of food chemicals - both synthetic and natural - can affect behaviour. Given the poor diet that many kids receive unintentionally from their parents I am not surprised to see a rise in difficult behaviour. I wouldn't expect this to be the only cause - there have been many other changes in children's lives recently including over-testing in schools, internet and computer-games addiction,and overworked absent parents. But I'm sure that diet is a factor - perhaps the major factor.
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