Factors like sex, race or foster care status didn’t explain the fivefold jump in psychotropic stacking. The results expose a system primed to drug children rather than help them.
The physician assistant who wrote the prescription failed to mention that the FDA had never approved guanfacine—whose side effects include blurred vision, confusion, dizziness, severe weakness and depression—for toddlers like Easton.
The drug made Easton “like a zombie,” according to his aunt and adoptive mother, Kymberly Stacks. Yet each time she raised her concerns with the physician assistant, the answer was to increase the dose.
Up and up the doses went, until Stacks switched to a psychiatrist who promptly put him on the antipsychotic Abilify.
Then the stimulant Evekeo.
Followed by Concerta, ProCentra and Ritalin.
None “cured” him.
“We have made a mess and it’s dangerous.”
Now age 6 and a veteran of six psychiatric drugs, he’s presently on his seventh, Quelbree, another ADHD drug.
Its side effects include insomnia, blood-pressure problems, depression and suicide.
How will Easton’s story end? More drugs until the symptoms suppressing his symptoms are more palatable to society at large, or until he’s too drugged out to function at all?
“I constantly think he was put on medication way too young, but no doctor ever said anything,” said Stacks.
The doctors may not be talking, but the Medicaid stats speak loud and clear: Of roughly 166,000 children ages 3 to 14 who started ADHD drugs in 2019, over 39,000—more than 23 percent—were taking two or more psychiatric drugs at the same time by 2023. More than 4,400 of these children were on four psychotropics simultaneously. Children who were started on ADHD drugs at younger ages were considerably more likely to be prescribed additional psychiatric drugs over the ensuing four years.
“There are concerns about safety, because there can be additive adverse effects of different types of medications,” said Dr. Javeed Sukhera, of the Institute of Living at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut.
“We have made a mess and it’s dangerous,” said Jennifer Havens of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “If a kid is on five, six, seven medications, that’s just wrong.”
Yet it continues.
