Posts Tagged ‘Foster Children’

Putting Profit Above Children’s Lives

Monday, August 30th, 2021

The child mental health industry is a system that puts profit above children’s lives, preying on unsuspecting parents and taking advantage of disadvantaged children, such as those covered under Medicaid (state and federal health coverage for lower income families and those with disabilities). It is rife with abuse, yet this hugely profitable industry is rarely held to account for its rampant abuse of our most vulnerable—children.

It is an industry which milks the foster care system for huge profit, where children are four times more likely to be given mind-altering psychotropic drugs than non-foster care children, and much more likely to be prescribed cocktails of these drugs.

It is an industry that electroshocks children including babies, using state funds for lower income families (Medicaid).

It is a business masquerading as healthcare which sells parents and legislators on the idea of helping troubled children. Yet this help is more often simply incarcerating children in behavioral schools or psychiatric wards, where treatment consists of psychiatric drug cocktails, degradation, solitary confinement, and brutal restraint procedures which have killed children. And all of this is done under the guise of helping children.

The abuse is not limited to one chain of psychiatric facilities or one mode of psychiatric behavioral “treatment.” This abuse in the child mental health industry is systemic—yet unknown to most of the public.

For example: Information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveals that 19 states are currently administering electroshock to children, with 7 of those states electroshocking children aged 0-5 years old. These are all children being electroshocked while psychiatrists and facilities bill Medicaid for their “treatment.”

Yet another example — Only one month after the world witnessed the tragic death of George Floyd, unable to breathe as he was physically restrained and held to the ground, 16-year-old Cornelius Frederick, an African American, was physically restrained at Sequel Youth & Family Services’ facility in Michigan, and also cried out, “I can’t breathe!” before passing out. Thirty hours later, on May 1, 2020, he was dead. Cornelius had gone into cardiac arrest while being restrained by Lakeside Academy staff, a residential psychiatric facility that treated foster care and other kids with behavioral issues. A witness to Cornelius’s restraint said, “[T]his kid threw a sandwich. He was being unruly and they couldn’t control him. So, four guys…the size of rugby players tackled him.”

Cornelius is not alone; countless children have suffocated and died after being subjected to deadly restraints within these psychiatric facilities and behavioral treatment centers.

This is not healthcare. This is child abuse. And it is just the tip of the iceberg.

Please help us to support the cause and end the abuse of children in the psychiatric industry. We are making incredible progress, as many of the psychiatric facilities abusing these children are now under investigation. And many state legislators want to put an end to this abuse. There is more to be done, and so we ask you to continue to support our Fight For Kids campaign. Please support the cause and also watch our latest video here.

For more information, visit our Child Psychiatric Treatment page here.

Childhood Is Not A Mental Disorder

Great Circle Child Abuse in Missouri

Monday, February 22nd, 2021

Great Circle, the largest provider of residential psychiatric treatment for juveniles (mainly in foster care) in Missouri, announced February 15 2021 that it will shut down its residential treatment program in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis.

The FBI raided them on February 2, 2021 due to alleged child abuse. The Missouri Department of Social Services had suspended placements there on January 22, 2021. Webster Groves police arrested three of their employees on suspicion of child abuse. The nonprofit’s former CEO, Vincent Hillyer, was charged with child abuse in 2019.

Great Circle has 12 other residential facilities in Missouri for juvenile psychiatric treatment which so far remain open, although the FBI raid included their facility near St. James, Missouri.

The psychiatric abuse of foster children is a growing concern, especially the use of harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs as a restraint mechanism.

A previous lawsuit against the Missouri Department of Social Services claimed that children in Missouri foster care are at increased risk of being improperly or unnecessarily administered psychotropic drugs, leaving the children vulnerable to various serious adverse effects, including hallucinations, self-harm and suicidal thoughts.

Roughly 13,000 children are in Missouri’s foster care system. More than 30% of them are prescribed these harmful drugs, and 20% are taking two or more drugs at the same time. Medicaid pays for a majority of the healthcare services that children in foster care receive, including psychotropic drugs.

Most psychotropic drugs have not been FDA approved to treat children, who are at great risk of serious harm from these drugs because the drugs play Russian Roulette with neurotransmitters in the brain.

Contact your State legislators and let them know what you think about this.

[UPDATE 3/3/2021] Four additional employees of Great Circle are now charged with abusing residents, including two children with autism. 

[UPDATE 3/31/2021] A Missouri Department of Social Services audit of Medicaid claims for services paid through the state to Great Circle identified $1,992,157 in “improper billing.”

Task Force Against Racism & Modern Day Eugenics

Monday, February 1st, 2021

People need proper and effective healthcare, not damaging drugs and electroshock that passes for mental health treatment today. Funds should be redirected from psychiatry into safe, accountable non-psychiatric medical care and social programs. This is especially true for the African American community, given psychiatry’s long history of racist eugenics theories which still permeate modern day mental health care.

—Reverend Fred Shaw

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is the leading mental health industry watchdog in the world, responsible for helping to enact more than 180 worldwide reforms that protect the public from abusive mental health practices.

In 2020, CCHR International spokesperson Reverend Fred Shaw, started a Task Force against Institutional Racism in the Psychiatric Industry, comprising African American attorneys, civil rights advocates, educators and doctors. The Task Force reminds African Americans of the mental health industry’s history of stigmatizing minorities—from labeling runaway slaves and civil rights protesters as mentally ill and the use of eugenics (population control that targeted African Americans, sterilizing them) to segregating children in schools and the foster-child-welfare system today and drugging them.

This type of rampant abuse of African Americans within the mental health industry continues to this day. Shaw has now launched a Task Force to combat institutional racism and empower the African American and minority communities with facts about modern eugenics masked today as “mental health care.” The Task Force comprises African American leaders, including ministers, attorneys, doctors, psychologists and civil rights advocates.

For generations eugenics—the fraudulent, dehumanizing and harmful psychological theory that certain races of color were not equal to whites and, therefore, “deserved” fewer rights—has been used in the mental health system and in other social policies to justify horrific oppression of African Americans and minorities.

https://www.cchrtaskforce.org/

Babies Under a Year Old Being Given Harmful Psychiatric Drugs

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2020

CCHR International obtained the real statistics on the number of U.S. children being prescribed psychiatric drugs: 7.2 million.

Of those, 508,000 are aged 2-5 years old, equal to the entire population of Sacramento, California. 125,000 are babies aged 0-1.

If you’re trying to visualize that number, it’s more babies than would fit into the largest college football stadium in the U.S. (Michigan Stadium, also known as “The Big House.”)

Why this isn’t generally reported is because we were only able to obtain these statistics through the purchase of a costly official report, a truly vital endeavor, made possible only through your donations.

From this, the question you’re probably asking is How on earth could 125,000 babies be put on powerful mind altering drugs?

It’s a logical question. We believe we have the answer and that with your help, together we can do something about it.

CCHR has long suspected that one of the reasons there are so many children on drugs, particularly ones so young and even babies, is through MEDICAID, which is state and federal funding for low income families, their children, as well as for foster care children. There is a financial incentive for child drugging because of Medicaid, as the states receive funding based on costs incurred for treating children, including with psychotropic drugs.

A 2015 report on Medicaid found: “The high rates of psychotropic medication use in the Medicaid population, risks associated with these drugs, and research documenting inappropriate prescribing, have raised concerns, especially for children involved in the child welfare system.”

While there has been some media coverage on this issue and concern raised by legislators, nothing truly effective is being done about it. Moreover, there has never been a state-by-state analysis of exactly how many babies and toddlers are being drugged, using taxpayer dollars (i.e. Medicaid).

In order to fully expose this, and what state legislators are unwittingly funding (baby, toddler and child drugging), CCHR International began filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for state Medicaid records (FOIA only applies to government agencies). What we have found to date is confirming our suspicions. Consider the number of Medicaid-funded children being drugged in the following states:

Georgia 177,469
Pennsylvania 150,250
Illinois 74,635
Utah 46,241

For Missouri in 2014, for example, there were 24,388 children, in or out of foster care, who were receiving public mental health services (meaning they were likely on one or more psychotropic drugs.) Total foster care drug costs have averaged roughly $16 Million per year in Missouri. More than 30 percent of Missouri’s roughly 13,000 Medicaid foster children per month are on at least one psychotropic medication, with 20 percent taking two or more psychotropic medications at the same time.

We can pretty much guarantee that state legislators are unaware that funds are being used to drug so many toddlers and infants. And because Medicaid is funded by the states, legislators can do something about it.

The idea of putting vulnerable babies and toddlers on drugs is horrifying. All of this can be hard to confront. But we must. With your help we can not only expose it, but demand that those in power do something about it.

Please contact your State Representatives and Senators and let them know what you think about this. In Missouri, find your Representative and Senator by 9-digit Zip Code here:http://www.senate.mo.gov/legislookup/ZipLookup.aspx.

Be a Hero and help someone who has been a victim of psychiatric abuse by making a tax deductible donation to CCHR St. Louis!

Child Psychiatric Treatment—Drugs, Solitary Confinement, Torture and Abuse

Wednesday, November 4th, 2020

This Is Why We Fight For Kids

THERE CAN BE NO KEENER REVELATION OF A SOCIETY’S SOUL THAN THE WAY IN WHICH IT TREATS ITS CHILDREN.” — NELSON MANDELA

The child mental health industry is a system that puts profit above children’s lives, preying on unsuspecting parents and taking advantage of disadvantaged children, such as those covered under Medicaid (state and federal health coverage for lower income families and those with disabilities). It is rife with abuse, yet this hugely profitable industry is rarely held to account for its rampant abuse of our most vulnerable—children.

It is an industry which milks the foster care system for huge profit, where children are four times more likely to be given mind-altering psychotropic drugs than non-foster care children, and much more likely to be prescribed cocktails of these drugs.

It is an industry that electroshocks children including babies, using state funds for lower income families (Medicaid).

It is a business masquerading as healthcare which sells parents and legislators on the idea of helping troubled children. Yet this help is more often simply incarcerating children in behavioral schools or psychiatric wards, where treatment consists of psychiatric drug cocktails, degradation, solitary confinement, and brutal restraint procedures which have killed children. And all of this is done under the guise of helping children.

THE ABUSE IS NOT LIMITED TO ONE CHAIN OF PSYCHIATRIC FACILITIES OR ONE MODE OF PSYCHIATRIC OR BEHAVIORAL “TREATMENT.” THE ABUSE, WHICH PROLIFERATES THE CHILD MENTAL HEALTH INDUSTRY, IS SYSTEMIC—YET UNKNOWN TO MOST OF THE PUBLIC.

For example: Information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveals that 19 states are currently administering electroshock to children, with 7 of those states electroshocking children aged 0-5 years old. These are all children being electroshocked while psychiatrists and facilities bill Medicaid for their “treatment.”

Yet another example—Only one month after the world witnessed the tragic death of George Floyd, unable to breathe as he was physically restrained and held to the ground, 16-year-old Cornelius Frederick, an African American, was physically restrained at Sequel Youth & Family Services’ facility in Michigan, and also cried out, “I can’t breathe!” before passing out. Thirty hours later, on May 1, 2020, he was dead. Cornelius had gone into cardiac arrest while being restrained by Lakeside Academy staff, a residential psychiatric facility that treated foster care and other kids with behavioral issues. A witness to Cornelius’s restraint said, “[T]his kid threw a sandwich. He was being unruly and they couldn’t control him. So, four guys…the size of rugby players tackled him.”

Cornelius is not alone; countless children have suffocated and died after being subjected to deadly restraints within these psychiatric facilities and behavioral treatment centers.

This is not healthcare. This is child abuse. And it is just the tip of the iceberg.

Therefore, please avail yourself of the information presented on our Fight For Kids website. Until enough people become aware of mental health industry abuse of children and teens, and arm themselves with the facts to protect not only their own children, but advocate for those who have no voice, it will continue. The profits will keep rolling in, parents will suffer and children will be abused.

This is the Fight For Kids.

And it is only possible through your support.

Psychiatry Profiting from Community Tragedy and Racism

Monday, June 22nd, 2020

In 2010 a 16-year-old African-American foster child died after being injected with two psychiatric drugs and restrained in SSM DePaul Health Center, a St. Louis company-owned psychiatric ward, and ruled a homicide. Less than two years earlier, a death at the same hospital in the Bridgeton suburb of St. Louis had led to a state inquiry that uncovered instances of improperly secluding and restraining patients and failing to report deaths to authorities.

Before she died, the foster child was held down and injected with Geodon (ziprasidone, a psychiatric antipsychotic drug) and Ativan (lorazepam, a psychiatric anti-anxiety drug).

It wasn’t until 2017 that a lawsuit was filed against the Children’s Division of the Missouri Department of Social Services for overdrugging foster children with harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs, for which a settlement was reached in 2019.

Some of the behavioral hospital chains that have come under scrutiny for patient abuse include six facilities operating in Missouri.

And now today the abuse continues, with African-Americans over-represented in restraint-related deaths of children and adults with disabilities, accounting for 22% of the deaths studied while representing only 13% of the total U.S. population. African-Americans are dying from COVID-19 at almost three times the rate of whites.

As a human rights organization, exposing racism and restraint abuse in the mental health system has been a pivotal campaign since the inception in 1969 of Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). This also included exposing psychosurgery experiments on African-American prisoners and a 1994 booklet on psychiatry creating racism. CCHR has successfully worked with the NAACP since 2003, exposing the stigmatizing labeling and drugging of African-American children to obtain three national NAACP resolutions against the forced drugging and also electroshocking of children and teens.

CCHR’s co-founder, Dr. Thomas Szasz, a professor of psychiatry, exposed that while Dr. Benjamin Rush, the “Father of American Psychiatry” asserted he was anti-slavery in the late 1700s and signed the Declaration of Independence, he purchased a child slave that he later freed for compensation. He provided a medical model we still see the impact of today that was used to justify segregation and modern racism. Rush claimed that Blacks suffered from a “medical” disease called “negritude” derived from leprosy. Therefore, he asserted that freed Blacks should be segregated and prevented from inter-racial marriage so as to not spread the disease. Rush believed the “cure” was when their skin turned white.

A seal of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) that features Rush, a racist and slave owner, is still used for ceremonial purposes and internal documents. There’s also an annual award the APA gives in his name. How appallingly hypocritical, then, that within days of the recent racial protest marches starting, the APA issued a press statement, saying, it “will not stand for racism against Black Americans,” when history shows otherwise. APA urged anyone suffering from the recent trauma or civil unrest to, “seek psychiatric treatment.”

This comes from a group whose members invented the term “protest psychosis” in the 1960s to describe Blacks participating in the Civil Rights movement. Advertisements placed in psychiatric journals for powerful antipsychotic drugs used angry black men or African tribal symbols to influence the prescriptions of antipsychotics to African-Americans. Today, there is still an over-representation of antipsychotic use among African-Americans and harmful psychotropic drugs are prescribed to African-American children as young as 18 months.

African-American students also receive disproportionate discipline in schools. Representing about 15% of the total enrollment, African-American students accounted for 27% of restraints and 23% of seclusion in schools.

CCHR can access over 50 years of research that documents the horrible betrayal of African-American and other groups by a eugenics-based, racist psychiatric-psychological model that has caused immeasurable harm and suffering.

Click here for more information on how psychiatry creates racism.

Reverend Fred Shaw has worked alongside the NAACP in getting 3 national resolutions passed.

Missouri Settlement Changes Psychiatric Drug Use in Foster Kids

Sunday, July 28th, 2019

A class action federal lawsuit [Case No. 2:17-cv-04102-NKL] against the Missouri Department of Social Services alleging the overdrugging of foster children with harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs was given preliminary approval for settlement by U.S. District Court Judge Nanette Laughrey (Western District of Missouri) on Monday, July 15, 2019.

[Update 1: On December 5, 2019 the Court granted final approval of the Settlement Agreement.]

[Update 2: In an April 3, 2020 order, U.S. District Judge  Nanette K. Laughrey awarded a total of $3,253,651 in fees and $132,907 in expenses to the team of 20 plaintiffs’ attorneys.]

The case was first filed in June 2017 by national non-profit organizations Children’s Rights and the National Center for Youth Law (NCYL), the Saint Louis University School of Law Legal Clinics, and pro-bono counsel Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP.

The lawsuit claimed that children in Missouri foster care are at increased risk of being improperly or unnecessarily administered psychotropic drugs, leaving the children vulnerable to various serious adverse effects, including hallucinations, self-harm and suicidal thoughts.

Roughly 13,000 children are in Missouri’s foster care system. More than 30% of them are prescribed these harmful drugs, and 20% are taking two or more drugs at the same time. Medicaid pays for a majority of the healthcare services that children in foster care receive, including psychotropic drugs.

Most psychotropic drugs have not been FDA approved to treat children, who are at great risk of serious harm from these drugs because the drugs play Russian Roulette with neurotransmitters in the brain.

The settlement calls for multiple reforms, although without any of the defendants admitting any liability concerning any of the claims or allegations in the complaint. Objections, support, or comments by Class members or their legal representatives (or other interested parties) can be provided by October 23, 2019 per the “Notice of Proposed Class Action Settlement in M.B., et al. v. Tidball, et al.

The Missouri Department of Social Services, on behalf of the Missouri Children’s Division of the Department of Social Services, has contracted with the University of Missouri-Columbia to constitute a Center for Excellence within its Department of Psychiatry to undertake various responsibilities regarding this settlement, for roughly $3.8 million through July 31, 2021, although this contract is not specifically part of the settlement. While we applaud the Missouri government for taking action to address the abuse of foster children in their care, we must note that having psychiatrists oversee psychiatric abuse is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.

Specific commitments of the settlement include (these provisions are only briefly summarized here; refer to the actual settlement for full details):
1. Children’s Division (CD) shall maintain a full-time employee responsible for overseeing the implementation of policies and procedures concerning the use of psychotropic drugs for children in CD foster care.
2. Provisions for CD Case Management Staff Training.
3. Provisions for Resource Provider Training.
4. Provisions for training in the child welfare community serving children in Missouri.
5. CD shall maintain sufficient Case Management Staff to perform functions of the agreement.
6. Every child shall have a mental health assessment prior to being prescribed a psychotropic drug.
7. Every child prescribed a psychotropic drug shall have medical examinations.
8. Every child prescribed a psychotropic drug for ongoing use shall have monitoring appointments.
9. Every child prescribed a psychotropic drug shall receive concurrent nonpharmacological treatment.
10. Defendants are committed to developing and operating one or more statewide systems for maintaining medical records and/or medical information of each child in the custody of CD.
11. Defendants are committed to developing and operating one or more systems whereby pertinent medical records and/or medical information of the child will be made available to appropriate members of the child’s treatment team.
12. CD will implement and maintain a system for conducting secondary reviews of prescriptions of psychotropic drugs prescribed to children in the legal custody of CD.
13. CD shall maintain a policy governing informed consent and informed assent for psychotropic drugs, including a process for parental disagreement. The difference between consent and assent is basically that consent comes from the case manager and assent comes from the child.
14. Provisions for emergency administration of psychotropic drugs.
15.Defendants will appoint and maintain a psychotropic drug Advisory Committee to provide professional and technical consultation and policy advice.
16. Provisions for excessive dosage guidelines.

There are other provisions for data validation, enforcement, reporting, and exit criteria from the agreement. Refer to the actual agreement for these details.

Go here for more information about psychiatric abuse in the foster care system.

Involuntary Commitment Under Another Name

Monday, April 8th, 2019

The Acting Cook County Illinois Public Guardian filed a class-action lawsuit (Golbert et al v. Walker et al) December 13, 2018 on behalf of hundreds of children and teenagers in state care who have been held in psychiatric hospitals after they had been cleared by doctors for release, calling the practice inhumane and unconstitutional.

The lawsuit follows a ProPublica Illinois investigation that found nearly 30 percent of children in DCFS care who were sent to psychiatric hospitals between 2015 and 2017 were held there after doctors had cleared them for discharge.

It may not legally be Involuntary Commitment, but it has the same harmful physical and emotional effects. Some children were sexually exploited.

Every 1¼ minutes, someone in the U.S. becomes the next victim of involuntary incarceration in a psychiatric hospital. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

With health care eating up vast amounts of our national budget, the first spending cut to make is the cost of “treating” people who prefer not to be mentally treated or whose treatment is no longer necessary. Involuntary incarceration hikes federal, state, county, city and private health care costs under the strange circumstance of a patient–recipient who is not allowed to leave when treatment is over. ProPublica Illinois found that DCFS spent nearly $7 million on medically unnecessary hospitalizations between 2015 and 2017.

Read more about this here.

Press Release – CCHR STL Visits Missouri State Capitol

Friday, February 8th, 2019

Jefferson City, Missouri – February 6, 2019

Citizens Commission on Human Rights, founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and the late psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz, has been vigilant in exposing the lack of science behind psychiatry’s diagnostic methods and treatments that, left unquestioned for years by authorities and insurance companies, led to soaring increases in both health care costs and the prescription of dangerous and addictive psychiatric drugs.

It is time for the Missouri legislature to put an end to this lucrative scam and thereby help protect our citizens. Instead put our citizen’s money into proven physical health care and education, where it will produce real results. An example of a real positive result would be: patients recovering and being sent, sane, back into society as productive individuals. The introduction and passage of legislation designed to curb psychiatric fraud and abuse can contribute much to this effort.

To this end, CCHR St. Louis once again visited the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City February 5 and 6, 2019, and set up a display in the Capitol Building, talking to legislators and their aides about fraud and abuse in the mental health care system.

Volunteers personally visited with many Representatives and Senators, distributing packages containing the CCHR documentary DVD “Making A Killing – The Untold Story of Psychotropic Drugging” (MAK) and explanatory materials about harmful electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and the over-drugging of foster children.

The MAK documentary exposes the problem of psychotropic drugs, the profits they generate and the harm they do. CCHR recommends investigating the link between psychotropic drugs and the sharp rise in violence and suicide.

Claims that ECT is safe and effective are not supported by clinical science and its use remains a theoretical practice with no conclusive mechanism determined to prove how ECT works. CCHR recommends outlawing this barbaric practice.

In Missouri as well as nationwide, there is a significant problem over-drugging foster care children with harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs. CCHR recommends legislation to develop explicit foster children’s rights.

Legislators welcome the contact, so contact them, let them know you appreciate what they do, and make specific suggestions to correct the egregious abuses of the psychiatric industry in Missouri. Subscribe to the CCHR STL newsletter so you receive our legislative take-action alerts.

Over-Drugging Foster Care Children

Monday, October 29th, 2018

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) released their September, 2018 reportTreatment Planning and Medication Monitoring Were Lacking for Children in Foster Care Receiving Psychotropic Medication.

A previous 2015 OIG report found serious quality-of-care concerns in the treatment of children with psychotropic drugs. This year’s report follows up on that with a sample of 625 children in foster care from the 5 States that had the highest utilization of psychotropic medications in their foster care populations in FY 2013 — Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Virginia.

Medicaid pays for a majority of the healthcare services that children in foster care receive, including psychotropic drugs. In 2013, the most recent year for which there was complete data available in the Medicaid Statistical Information System, state Medicaid programs paid approximately $366 million for psychotropic drugs for nearly 240,000 children in foster care up to age 21.

This table shows some of the data for these five states, plus Missouri for comparison, and the totals for all 50 states.

State (FY2013)Population of Children in Foster CareNumber of Children in Foster Care Treated with Psychotropic DrugsPercentage of Children in Foster Care Treated with Psychotropic DrugsTotal Medicaid fee-for-service Expenditures for Psychotropic Drugs for Children in Foster Care
Iowa13,9514,98135.70%$7,135,849
Maine3,5271,15532.70%$1,600,692
New Hampshire2,61494436.10%$1,741,581
North Dakota2,7341,02137.30%$1,184,934
Virginia14,9995,58437.20%$11,959,404
Missouri34,8179,84728.30%$26,130,684
Total All 50 States1,073,340238,46522.20%$365,555,960

What OIG Found
In these five states, one in three children in foster care who were treated with psychotropic drugs did not receive treatment planning or drug monitoring as required by the states.

The HHS Administration for Children and Families (ACF) is responsible for awarding Federal funding to states’ child welfare programs and for overseeing those programs. Ostensibly they require each state to comply with approriate treatment planning and drug monitoring. Unfortunately, not only is this not consistently occurring, it is not consistently being done with the professional practice guidelines from psychiatric professional organizations. In other words, it isn’t really being professional or effective, to the detriment of many thousands of foster care children across the country.

OIG recognizes that these drugs can have serious adverse side effects, and the 34% of children who did not receive treatment planning or drug monitoring are liable to be the ones experiencing issues such as too many mind-altering drugs, incorrect dosages, incorrect durations, incorrect indications for use, or inappropriate treatments.

ACF complains that they have statutory and regulatory constraints that prevent them from fully implementing and reporting on treatment planning and drug monitoring. And the states have been getting away with lax treatment planning and drug monitoring because they can, putting foster care children at risk, while consuming nearly $366 million in taxpayer funds for harmful and addictive drugs that may be entirely inappropriate for many vulnerable children.

More than 30 percent of Missouri’s current foster children population are on at least one psychotropic medication, with 20 percent taking two or more psychotropic medications at the same time. This is almost twice the national rate of such prescriptions. These drugs are known to cause violence and suicide, as well as being addictive. Foster children are drugged with these harmful psychotropics at 13 times the rate of children living with their parents.

The real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose children’s problems as an “illness”, and stigmatize unwanted behavior or study problems as “diseases.” Psychiatry’s stigmatizing labels, programs and treatments are harmful junk science; their diagnoses of “mental disorders” are a hoax – unscientific, fraudulent and harmful.

Click here for more information about psychiatric drugs harming foster care children.