Dr. Peter Breggin and I want to take a moment to wish every one of you a Happy New Year filled with hope and resiliency! Even as we struggle with the sadness and tragedies related to biopsychiatry and the psychopharmaceutical complex, we seek positive and encouraging messages. Better, more humane, more empathic approaches to human emotional crises and distress are potentially many and varied. In a number of his books, Dr. Breggin has documented some of these better approaches, from Soteria House to peer support groups and from counseling and psychotherapy to psychiatric drug withdrawal. Beyond that, we need to continue our efforts to create a climate into which we can envision new directions for helping people.

Social worker Richard Gottlieb adds a story this week about helping an 11 year old boy, who narrowly avoided being swept into the psychiatric web. Thanks, Dick, for this important reminder about human relationship.

Very best, Ginger Breggin, Editor
 

The Psychiatric Drugging of America's Foster Children
by Peter R. Breggin, MD and Ginger Ross Breggin
first published in the HuffingtonPost

The most vulnerable among us are the littlest victims. Young children, torn from their birth families through various, often unspeakable tragedies. These children end up in state supervised foster care and too often are passed from hand to hand, house to house. There were approximately 662,000 children in foster care in the United States in 2010.

Now there is a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report confirming that foster children in five states -- Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Texas -- are receiving shocking amounts of psychiatric drugs. In the words of ABC News, they are "being prescribed psychiatric medications at doses higher than the maximum levels approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in these five states alone. And hundreds of foster children received five or more psychiatric drugs at the same time despite absolutely no evidence supporting the simultaneous use or safety of this number of psychiatric drugs taken together." The ABC News report shows one 7-year-old holding a bag filled with 13 psychiatric medications that she had taken.

During the FDA drug-approval process, the maximum dose of a drug is determined by giving that drug by itself without any other psychoactive substances. When two or more psychiatric drugs are given together, each at its maximum dose, toxic levels of exposure can occur. In addition, some of these children are being given higher than the FDA-approved dose of individual drugs.

One young child interviewed by ABC News described the effect of the antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs he was taking: "They made me feel like I had a thousand bricks on my head." Another child said, "Some of the medications were for ADHD but I'm not ADHD, I'm just naughty." A teen in foster care on multiple psychiatric drugs told ABC News she felt like a "guinea pig."    Read the rest of the blog, here.

The New Face of Pet Therapy-- The practice, once limited to nursing homes, is aiding people, young and old, with a range of ills

TUESDAY, Dec. 27 (HealthDay News) -- No doubt about it. People have a deep and complex relationship with animals, which elicit a wide range of emotional responses by their very presence and interactions with human beings.

But these days, animals are being involved in human therapy in innovative ways that depart drastically from traditional notions of animal-assisted therapy.

"Most people think of nursing homes, and people going in to cheer up the elderly," said Bill Kueser, vice president of marketing for the Delta Society, a nonprofit group that promotes animal-assisted therapy. "It's really become much more than that."

            Animals have become part of many types of psychotherapy, physical therapy and crisis response, Kueser said. And it's not simply using a therapy dog to calm or soothe a person, either, he said.

Cats and parrots, for instance, are being incorporated into therapy for people who tend to act out because of aggression or impulse control issues, Kueser said.

"The animal will stay near that person until the person starts upsetting the animal, and then they'll move away," he said. "The doctor then can point out the effect the patient's behavior had on the animal. They seem to be able to work through aggression issues more effectively that way."

Larger animals also are being used in therapy. Horses are helping troubled teenagers better control their behavior, according to the Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association. The kids gain self-esteem from working with such a large animal, but they also learn to regulate their emotions so they don't "spook" the horse.

People undergoing physical therapy to regain motor skills essential to living also are receiving help from animals. "Instead of moving pegs around on a peg board, the patient might be asked to buckle or unbuckle a leash, or brush an animal," Kueser said.

Even normally calm people who are facing stressful situations are getting help these days from animals.

A new study involving rats made the news recently. The New York Times account of the study reported that "the researchers placed a free-roaming rat in an arena with a caged rat. Over the course of several days, the free rats realized they could nudge open a door and release the caged rat. After figuring this out, they did so repeatedly, day after day."

This story really made the rounds over the internet.  Other coverage in addition to The New York Times included Wired Science which reported

With a few liberating swipes of their paws, a group of research rats freed trapped labmates and raised anew the possibility that empathy isn’t unique to humans and a few extra-smart animals, but is widespread in the animal world.

Though more studies are needed on the rats’ motivations, it’s at least plausible they demonstrated “empathically motivated pro-social behavior.” People would generally call that helpfulness, or even kindness.

“Rats help other rats in distress. That means it’s a biological inheritance,” said neurobiologist Peggy Mason of the University of Chicago. “That’s the biological program we have.”

In a study published Dec. 7 in Science, Mason and University of Chicago psychologists Jean Decety and Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal describe their rat empathy-testing apparatus: An enclosure into which pairs of rats were placed, with one roaming free and the other restrained inside a plastic tube. It could only be opened from the outside, which is exactly what the free rats did — again and again and again, seemingly in response to their trapped companions’ distress.

4 years ago, an 11 year old boy was brought to my office by his parents.  He had always been an excellent student until this year.  He was bright, a little shy, a little odd, a lot friendly and kind, a little self-conscious about his oddness, and in all ways wonderful.  He didn't want to go to school anymore.  He had trouble sleeping, was extremely anxious and withdrawn, and had distanced from everyone in the family.  The school had recommended medication for ADHD.  The pediatrician had recommended antidepressants.

In my office, he sat on the couch between his very concerned parents, as they laid out the problems with their son.  After listening for about 5 minutes, during which time the kid's head had been down and his hands clasped in front of him cradled within his legs, I turned my attention to him and told him I was going to talk to his parents now, and that I would appreciate it if he did not talk.  I asked him if he would agree to that and he gave me a barely-perceptible nod.

I then asked the parents "Have you ever been in a grocery store and observed a little kid running around and misbehaving?"  They looked at eachother and both said they had.  The 11 year old didn't make a movement or sound.  I went on, "Who do you blame for the misbehavior?"  They looked at eachother again and the father said "The parents."  "Right" I said.  "Now I want to ask you who we should blame for a child's difficulty in school."  The mother, in more of a questioning than answering tone said "The teacher?"  "Right" I said.  The 11 year old's head raised enough that his eyes became visible to me and I immediately reminded him that we had an agreement that he wouldn't talk.  This time, in response, he verbalized "OK".  

I went on and asked the parents why the teacher wasn't here so we could help her correct the mistakes she was making.  The parents said that they hadn't been looking at it as a problem with the teacher.  I quickly responded, "Well then, we would need the teacher and both of you in the room in order to correct all of your mistakes."  The boy raised his head and asked if he could say something.  "Not yet" I said.  I then reminded the parents that they made a mistake by not thinking about the teacher's mistakes, and the only one who hadn’t made a mistake and the only one who didn’t need to be in my office was their son.  

At this point the boy forcefully raised his head and said "I want to talk now."  With great difficulty and obvious pain, he told the detailed story of how the teacher had humiliated him on the 3rd day of school when he gave an answer to the teacher’s question, and she laughed derisively at him.  I told the parents that they would have to speak with the teacher tomorrow and set up a meeting so that the teacher could apologize to their son and understand that he was not there to be humiliated, but educated.  They promised to do so.  After a full family discussion, which now included the fully-throated son, of how to hold the meeting, who would talk, what they would say, etc., we ended the session with me asking them to let me know how the meeting went.

The next morning I received a message on my phone from the crying mother.  "I just wanted you to know, even before we have the meeting with the teacher, that our son came to us last night, hugged us both, and told us that he was going to have the first happy night of sleep that he's had since last summer.  Later that week, another call from the mom informed me that the meeting went well and that the teacher cried when she realized she had been so hurtful, and the boy returned happily to school the next day.  He was back being a fully engaged student within a week.

Now imagine the course of events if the recommendations from the pediatrician and the school had been followed.

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