Medication for children??.

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I am all for folks doing what is medically necessary for their children. However, let's try and stay a little centered here. While bashing melatonin, you failed to mention the effects of long term use of your drug of choice, Adderall:

"Long-term methylphenidate and amphetamine use has also been linked to abnormalities in brain development, similar to those found with long-term cocaine use."

This is but one. In addition it is recommended that children be taken off the medication from time to time to see how they do without it. Physicians are also hesitant to prescribe it to teenagers since it winds up being sold in high school parking lots more often than not.

Just a little balance.

Anything you ingest as a medicine is just that. The problem though is that many people assume that because the FDA has approved something that extensive studies were done to protect the public. Prozac was on the market for HOW MANY YEARS before they finally put a strict warning label on it.

I'm sure there are many on here who have first hand experience with alot of these meds and know it is not a panacea. Stop taking the meds and generally the symptoms are right back. It can be useful short term, but there are alot those in medicine don't know about these drugs long term. And the people who use these drugs are the "test" subjects if it is relatively new. The SSRIs have side effects that are common knowledge now but that they didn't associate with the medications when they first came out- like weight gain, involuntary movements, manic behavior AND the difficulty with stopping these meds even with tapering off. They didn't know at the time because they hadn't gathered enough data from patient complaints that this was a possibility. And the drug companies have an extremely poor track record of keeping both doctors and patients aware of issues.




Again there is no proof that anyone would benefit from a prescription - if they were curatives for anxiety or depression or OCD than people would no longer have issues from the conditions. I also don't subscribe to the perception that a person must medicate themselves to apparently be able to function to someone else's standard. It is an extremely personal desicion especially when it somes to any kind of medication for psychiatric or mental health issues. It is easy for others to say, especially if they have had only positive experiences with the stuff, that it would be great for everyone.

I'll repeat my last paragraph:

"It's difficult to make a blanket statement about medications. As individuals, what works for one won't work for another. If you can function and have a productive or decent life without them...then be happy that you don't need to rely on them."

Nothing is all black or white. As the old song goes 'walk a mile in my shoes'. No one can know what the other person has been through to either make them decide to finally give a medication a try or to be against all medications. As someone stated earlier, a little balance is needed here. There's no sense in being judgemental.

My husband and I were sooooooo against putting our son on meds until we knew how much he struggled in school. He has severe ADHD and OCD. We started on Ridalyn then to Adderall at the highest mg's. Then our old doctor did the worse thing possible. He put him on Adderall and Strattera at the same time. He stopped growing for 4 years! We no longer go to that doctor and took him off the adderall. He's done great on the strattera at 80mg a day. He still has his OCD but he can now concentrate in school. He started at 7 years old on the meds and now is 12. Each med reacts differently in each child. Some swear by the adderall some by the strattera. But we knew he had to be on something in order to function in school. We know its not a cure for AS but it gets him by. Plus once he hits puberty, he may need to get off them. You always have to think about the chemical changes they will go through when they hit puberty.

we also did the stratera and the adderal.. that was not a pretty site. from day one my son was violent on stratera. i am so happy that its working for some one... so far adderal is working for us. of all the meds he has taken it seems to have made him less in a stupor more focus and less violent.

The two meds together was a nightmare (adderall and strattera) but when we did his tests because he didn't grow, the specialist told us that one of adderalls side effects was stopping growth. So we went with the strattera and haven't had any side effects except for not sleeping which he has done that way before the meds. Thats just one of the AS effects. I just think each child is different when it comes to side effects of meds. I'm still hoping and praying for the day he can go off of them and function without them. Its the blood test every six months to make sure his meds aren't affecting his liver functions. It just seems like a no win situation when it comes to the meds.

My 5 yr old AS child has been prescribed Risperdal for pinching and hitting and also Clonedine for hyperness. I don't give him the Risperdal anymore because it never helped the pinching even when they upped his dose. The clodedine works ok but he heeds something that makes him less tired and helps with his obsessions....because he has too many and they are all consuming...

our Dr had given Ryan Clonedine to help him get to sleep at night. i tried it for a few nights and he was LOOPY the next day.. i did not have good luck with this one at all..

Americans luv pills? Next you will be saying we are FAT, SUV driving, war mongers

My main suggestion is letting them have some say and waiting until they can understand it. Also look at the side effects of them (like Zoloft has been known to cause manic episodes in children.)

I'm fat, and drive an SUV. 2 out of 3 ain't bad......

I lost 50 lbs, crashed my SUV and gave it away, lost faith in the war.

But I still love my pills

It makes the teachers happy.

It makes the doctors feel like they've done something.

It gives parents hope that the next parent-teacher conference will be quick and easy.

I also wonder how many parents are following the advice of other child professionals (doctors, teachers, social workers, etc.) regarding things other than ASDs. Many of children are also labeled ADD/ADHD which is routinely medicated now. As the one posted, the school assumed the child was on medication. I think some school staff would hand them out like candy if they could. The pressure here to medicate the active, inquisitive, non-compliant child is enormous.

In all the years of parenting, no doctor or teacher or psychologist suggested dietary changes, behavior modifications or treatment other than pills. For some of us, medication may be an illusion, for others, it may indeed help but I think our healthcare philosophy is to prescribe a pill for whatever ails you be it ASDs, high blood pressure or even smoking (yes, we have pills for that too now).

Personally, I'm holding out for a dependable laser treatment/cure for Spectrum disorders.

Our school system also assumed we were on a meds regimen with our son, 7 now. When they found out we were going against the grain, 3 yrs ago, by not medicating him, the school specialists (all but one!) launched a campaign of emails loaded with info links along with pamphlet hand outs every time we were at school for any reason. I kept them all as proof and a kind of reality check, in case we ever seriously consider meds as a real option. It became comical, except that we were very annoyed by all this attention. I can only suspect that there is an underlying reason for so much "CARE" to be given for one family.

I have read that there is a federal program to help school systems offset the cost of the extra time and effort, involved with despensing meds to the growing numbers of school students, by nursing staff members. I'm not sure if it's possible or not, but it would seem to be a great way to channel some extra dollars into the general fund or even a few extra staff members in a large district, by making sure the maximum number of students have their pills dispensed at school. I can see all kinds of problems with that idea. I'll try to find the article again. If there's any truth to it, we should remain aware.

One of the reasons I feel more strongly about this issue than before is that my doctor has had me on three different SSRIs over the past four years (only one I can remember right now is Zoloft) and I haven't responded well. I reached a kind of hollow place last winter, where I couldn't control certain symtoms that I had "worked out" on my own, over the years, (I'm 50, cynical, stubborn, maybe an idiot, but not a stupid one) and were no longer tiring me out. Things began to bother me in "old" ways and the side effects from the meds were becoming overwhelming. If some good was supposed to happen I missed it. I was still working during the Zoloft episodes and eventually I had had enough. I dumped over $400 worth of cr@p down the toilet last winter (were it rightly belonged, IMNSHO) and haven't looked back. I did go back for my blood tests and the doc scolded me for stopping without his help, but it had been 3 months and all was well. I am far better off without what I've tried so far and I feel my kids, 7 and 5, would have a similar reaction. I hope that their progress continues as they develop towards puberty and the issue is now dead.


I think the most troubling part of the notion of putting my kids on medication, in my mind, is that seven people were willing to push us in that direction without really knowing what my son's and daughter's symptoms are.

I think so many of us have reasons for doing what we do. i know it has worked very well in my sons case to have him on ADD meds.. I did a great deal of soul searching before I decided to take this route. I saw how hard it was for him to focus in school.. I knew that when I was a kid I failed, failed, failed in school.. i wish that when I was his age they had something to help me. because I felt like the biggest looser because I did so horrible in school.. i see what I lacked.. special services to help me in school as my son gets and Add meds to help me focus. to say that parents put our children on Meds to make those parent teacher confrences go easier is not the best thing to announce when so many of us made this choice.. I give those famlies oodles of credit for not putting your children on meds and they can get by without it.. it just means your child did not need them.. but who are some of you to generalize and think that the way you approached it was the best way or the only way? I went into this with full steam ahead to HELP my son.. not to make it easier on me. in fact its harder many times because I get him when he is not medicated after school or when I get home from work and he is BOUNCING off the walls.. My main goal was to not let my son fail in school.. we did 2 years in school without meds.. and I saw what a struggle it was for him to learn.. and he was getting specalized services.. out of classroom learning, aid intervention all the time.. it did not work.. he could not focus.. so I did what I thought was best.. just as some of you all did what you thought was best. the side effects can be bad. but its finding the right balance to what works. When Ryan wants to discuss his not taking meds and he is older I will talk with him. it will be his choice when he is mature enough to make the choice.. Please stop ripping the parents apart for what we thought was the good choice for our child.. we do not rip you apart for the choice you made.. and before you rip the educators up maybe you need to see how overworked they are and how they must deal with children day in and day out who have parents but lack the parenting skill. and they must deal with the children in their classroom every day who live in these battle grounds and by the time they have them as students they are so far gone there is little hope for them.. teachers have a very hard job.. i will be the 1st one to rip a teacher if she is not doing her job.. But lets face it if we want to change the school system the teacher is not the place to start. its the state/fed level.. and we all know the good old boys network will never let the schools change one bit!

Ryansjoy,

I hope you don't think my post was meant to put down someone who has made a different decision from us. I merely wanted to point out that there is no easy one-size-fits-all answer and the popular choice doesn't always fit without some adjustments.

We are fortunate in that, after school we can devote some time to go structure free for a half hour or so while the kids get decompressed from the day's tensions.

I admit that there are days, like fire drill days for instance, when both of them come home ready to explode or totally exhausted and ready to drop from depletion of raw will power. Often they just need some deep tissue stimulation or some severe vestibular "re-arrangement". Sometimes I'll grab my son and jerk his legs up in the air and we'll run around on his hands for 20 minutes imitating a wheel barrow. Or maybe my daughter needs to have the breath squeezed out of her a couple of dozen times and then crawl into her tiny private space for a few minutes to "re-set". I am lucky to be able to read their needs to some degree and devote the time and energy to meet Their Needs, along with helping them understand how to help themselves when they can.

I suppose, in a way, I AM the drug, but it's part of my job to teach them how to live without me ...