Ep. 146 - The Terrible Potential Consequences Of Giving Psychiatric Drugs To Kids
A young child began taking ADHD medicine that could cause suicidal thoughts. Weeks later she killed herself. The suicide rate among children has skyrocketed as the prevalence of psychotropic drugs has also skyrocketed. Is there some kind of connection here? Yes. And the drug companies know it. Today we'll talk about the practice of drugging kids, and the horrible things that can happen as a result. Date: 11-19-2018
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today on the Matt Wall Show, we're going to discuss the terrible tragic case of a young child who committed suicide.
Could her ADHD medicine have played a role in the tragedy?
Her parents think so.
So what can we learn from this case?
And what does it tell us about these drugs?
And how we should approach these drugs?
And how cautious we should be about putting our kids on these drugs?
We'll talk about all of that on The Matt Wall Show.
♪♪ Well, this is a horrific story.
Um...
Thank you.
Just horrible.
And I can barely stand to talk about it, but I think we need to talk about it.
Last week, a nine-year-old girl named Maddie Whitsett, she was in the fourth grade, and she hanged herself.
Committed suicide.
Her parents have said that their daughter came home from school that day.
This was, I believe, last Monday.
She came home from school apparently in a fine mood.
They were going to go to Chick-fil-A.
She was excited about that, running around the house.
You know, as you can imagine, if you have kids at home and you tell them you're going out to eat somewhere, they get really excited about that.
So she was running around the house, excited.
And then she went up to her room and her mom went up a little bit later to To get her and let her know it's time to go to lunch.
And that's when she found her daughter hanging in the closet.
Now.
Of course, you can't even begin to contemplate the horror of a scene like that.
I mean, it's just it's just unthinkable.
It's the worst.
It's the worst thing.
It's the worst thing in the world.
It's the worst thing that anyone could ever experience.
And my heart aches for her parents.
It's horrific.
Well, when something like this happens, of course, the obvious question is, the crucial question is, why?
How?
And to that end, it turns out that Maddie was often bullied at school.
She had been subjected, apparently, to an especially vicious round of bullying on that particular day, according to her friends.
So, we know that bullying played a role here.
It was a factor.
And there is no question that kids can be really vicious to each other.
And sometimes it's hard for us as adults Sometimes to remember what it was like to be a child and to be rejected by your peers It's it's a very devastating thing for kids.
It's hard for adults to deal with too, but especially for kids Because it's the kind of thing that a child is just not equipped to deal with I still remember the first time that my daughter I remember the first time my daughter was really kind of, I guess, bullied by someone, by a girl that she thought was a friend, I guess.
And I remember my daughter coming home that day, and she was really sad, and she was telling me about the way this girl had treated her.
But what struck me is that she was not only sad, but she was confused.
Like, she didn't understand Why somebody would treat her that way, you know?
She didn't understand cruelty.
It just was a concept that was new to her.
And so that's why kids often times have so much trouble dealing with these things because they're not cynical.
They don't have the cynicism that you and I have, where when someone's a jerk to us, we're just like, well, that's how people are.
We're not surprised by it, because we've been jaded by the world and we're such cynical people.
Kids aren't like that.
They like everyone, they love everyone, they expect everyone to treat them that way, and then when someone doesn't, they don't know how to cope with it, really.
So, when a child is subjected to this kind of stuff incessantly over a long period of time, And then they go, they take their own lives.
Obviously, you can draw a very sad connection between those kinds of things.
But her family suspects that something else might have also played a role.
ADHD medication.
Mattie's stepfather says that the girl had just recently begun taking a new drug for ADHD, and one of the side effects listed for the drug is suicidal thoughts.
We will never know for sure what was going on inside Maddie's mind that day.
But her parents don't think it's a coincidence that she started taking a psychotropic medication that causes suicidal thoughts a few weeks before she committed suicide.
And who can argue with them?
And when you think about it intuitively, the suicide of a young child just seems already like something that had to have been caused by an outside force, by a foreign agent of some kind.
Because children that age shouldn't have the idea of suicide anywhere on their radar.
They shouldn't even know what it is.
Right?
I mean, it's a terrible shock for anyone to commit suicide.
Suicide is a horrible, tragic, unnatural thing for anyone at any age.
But a nine-year-old?
How is that even possible?
How is it even possible for a nine-year-old to even think of that?
And, you know, people who are a little bit older, they'll always say, they'll say,
well, when I was a kid, this kind of stuff didn't happen.
You didn't have kids committing suicide when I was younger.
If you talk to someone who's 50 or 60 years old, that's what they'll tell you.
They're on to something.
Okay?
They're not just making that up.
In fact, the statistics bear this out.
That stories like Maddie's are much more common now than they used to be.
Studies have consistently shown this.
There was a study done recently that shows that the number of children who attempted or contemplated suicide has doubled in just the past decade.
Okay?
So just in the last 10 years, it's doubled.
Doubled.
Think about that.
And we know that this is a multifaceted phenomenon.
It can't be blamed on any one single factor, so it would be oversimplifying in the extreme to say that, okay, well here's this thing, and here's what causes it, and that's it.
We know that we can't do that.
But I think we make a mistake when we just chalk it up to bullying, and then we barely even consider what the other factors might be.
Because the fact is, kids have always been bullied.
And as I said, bullying for children is really difficult to deal with.
We know that, and we don't want to understate that or underestimate it.
But we also know that bullying has been in the world since time immemorial, yet kids have not always committed suicide at a rate like this.
So that means something else is clearly going on here.
And we also know that as the suicide rate among children has increased exponentially, So have the number of children prescribed psychiatric drugs.
There are currently over, I think it's over 7 million kids, pushing 8 million kids right now who are on some kind of psychotropic medication.
Over half of them are being treated for ADHD.
Now, we know that correlation does not prove causation.
So just because you've got, we know we have an increase in psychotropic medication among kids, an exponential increase, and then we also have an exponential increase in suicide.
So we know that these two things are increasing together.
That doesn't prove that the one causes the other.
But I do think that there's enough correlation here to at least make us wary about dosing our kids with this stuff.
And the drug companies obviously know that there is a connection between suicide and the stuff that they're producing, because that's why they list it as a side effect.
In fact, just a couple of years ago, health officials in Canada mandated that the companies that make ADHD medication, they have to make the suicide warnings clearer and stronger.
So, we know that there's a connection.
Nobody can deny it.
Even the drug companies know it.
They also know, and studies have shown this as well, that when you give psychiatric medication to children, it does leave a lasting mark on the developing brains of children.
Now, they might not want to talk about this, they might not want to admit it, but we know that.
We don't know exactly what those long-term effects are, or how they might manifest themselves, or how long the effects might last.
There's a lot we don't know.
And the people who want to defend these drugs, they're going to be quick to say this.
They're going to say, well, you know, you can't, it's not a one-to-one thing.
There's not a straightforward connection that can be drawn between, you know, suicide and these drugs, or violent behavior and the drugs.
Well, that's true, but that's just because we don't have all the information.
There's a pediatric psychologist named Ronald Brown, and here's how he put it.
He said, there is more use of psychotropic medication with children than there is research data on it.
Let me read that again.
There is more use of psychotropic medication with children than there is research data on it.
So the prescribing of these drugs has way outpaced the information and the data we have about how these drugs might affect our kids.
That's a problem.
And I would think that the lack of information, the lack of data, rather than that giving us a reason to just say, oh, well, we might as well just keep giving it to kids, that's a reason to pull back.
And to slow down and to exercise extreme caution before prescribing these substances to children.
But that apparently is not how the drug companies and the medical establishment sees it.
So they just keep churning out the pills, and they shove this stuff down the throats of our children, and they issue these assurances that it's all perfectly safe.
Safe?
How can you even say that?
How can you tell me that it might make a fourth grader consider suicide, but it's safe?
And how can you tell me that it might make a child hallucinate, and it might alter her personality, it might make her violent, it might make her aggressive, but it's safe?
And let's keep something in mind here.
Childhood suicide is just one of the awful and increasingly common phenomena that could be linked to psychiatric drugs.
Another one that we don't talk about enough is mass shootings.
Dozens of violent attacks in schools and school shootings have been carried out by kids who are on or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs.
And not just kids.
The Las Vegas shooter was on anxiety medicine.
The Colorado theater shooter was on antidepressants.
The Charleston shooter was on psychotropic drugs.
The Virginia Tech shooter was on psychotropic drugs.
At least one of the Columbine shooters was on psychotropic drugs.
The list goes on and on.
Now, can prescription medication be solely blamed for any of these attacks?
No, of course not.
Again, this is a multifaceted phenomenon.
And anytime you're dealing with something like this, when someone does something as extreme as carrying out a shooting or committing suicide, there are always going to be multiple factors that go into it.
But I don't think it's incidental, okay?
It is not incidental that so many mass shooters have been on psychotropic drugs.
I think it's foolish.
I think it's idiotic for us to say, well, yeah, you know, that's just a coincidence.
It's clearly not a coincidence.
Just like it's clearly not a coincidence that Mattie Whitsitt committed suicide while taking a drug that might cause a child to contemplate suicide.
Now, I think what we have to realize here is that drug companies and doctors are playing on a field that they don't really understand.
And they are making determinations that they really don't have the authority or the ability to make.
So what I mean is, in the case of ADHD, okay, what they've said is that kids Okay, so what they're saying, in other words, is that a child, they're looking at an ADHD child, and they're saying, well, that child shouldn't be that way.
That is not how a child should be.
In other words, they're looking at an ADHD child and they're saying,
Okay.
well, that child shouldn't be that way.
That is not how a child should be.
Okay?
But that's my problem.
That's my point.
And that's been my point with ADHD for years now.
I'm not saying that ADHD people don't exist.
We clearly know they exist.
So, anytime we have this conversation and someone says, well, you haven't met my son.
My son is bouncing off the walls, he's running around.
Are you saying that my son doesn't exist?
No, I know that your son exists.
I'm not denying the existence of your son.
Or my own son, by the way, who's exactly the same way.
Just bursting with energy, running around, can't stop talking, can't stop moving.
That's exactly how my son is.
I have no doubt whatsoever in my mind that if I took my son to a doctor and said, Doc, does he have ADHD?
They would say, yes, absolutely.
But I'm not going to take my kid to a doctor and ask that question because, yes, I know that these kinds of behaviors exist, but the label It's the decision to label it a disorder, okay?
That is what is man-made.
That's invented.
That is subjective.
Who decided?
Okay, we know that there are energetic kids who can't focus, they talk, they run around.
Fine, okay.
Who decided that that's wrong?
Why did we decide that kids aren't supposed to be that way?
How did we decide that that's in a disorder, that that is disordered behavior?
That's what I'm saying is completely subjective.
We made that up.
We have just declared that these kinds of people are sick because they don't gel with the systems that we have in place.
But that is not how a real medical diagnosis is supposed to work.
Okay, the diagnosis of cancer is not subjective because it's not dependent on anything else.
Okay, they don't diagnose cancer based on how much the cancer interferes with whatever else you've got going on in your life.
They don't diagnose cancer by looking at the ways that it interferes with your schoolwork or your home life or whatever.
Cancer is cancer.
But with ADHD and with many other alleged mental disorders, we only consider it a disorder because of the situational problems that it causes.
So, um, ADHD is not a problem at recess.
It's not a problem when a kid's on a playground.
It's not a problem when a kid's playing kickball.
It's also oddly not a problem when a kid is playing video games or sitting down to watch TV.
I mean, all these parents are saying that their kids can't sit still.
I've yet to hear one parent tell me that a kid can't sit still to play a video game.
Oddly enough, Every kid can manage that.
And I've never heard a parent say that a kid can't focus enough to play on the playground.
No, it's with particular things that we want them to do.
They struggle to do those things, and then we say, oh, well, they must be disordered if they can't manage to do this thing.
Now, It's true that some human behaviors are pretty clearly disordered.
Okay, so someone who hallucinates, someone who has delusions, someone who suffers extreme paranoia.
Obviously, these are disordered behaviors.
Obviously, this is a sign that something isn't right inside the head.
But what makes ADHD so absurd is that what we're saying is, well, A child is supposed to be energetic, is supposed to be fidgety, is supposed to be talkative.
Of course a child is going to have trouble focusing.
Of course a child is going to get bored doing schoolwork.
We know all that.
But if he's too energetic, and he's too fidgety, and he's too talkative, and he has too much trouble doing his schoolwork, then it's a disorder.
So we've drawn this completely arbitrary line and said that normal childhood behavior exists on this side of the line, and abnormal disordered behavior is on this side.
Well, who decided where the line is?
Again, we just made that up.
Now, when it comes to delusional paranoia or hallucinations, there is no amount of hallucinating that's normal.
Any amount of hallucinating.
If you have hallucinated even a little bit, that is abnormal, that is disordered, and clearly there's something wrong in your head.
If you experience any level of hallucinating whatsoever.
With ADHD, we are taking normal behavior, drawing an arbitrary line, and saying anything beyond that line is disorder.
That, again, is a determination that drug companies and doctors are not equipped to make.
This is like a philosophical No, we don't.
decision that they're making.
They're saying that, well, a person, this is how a person is supposed to be.
And this is the exact proportion of behaviors.
And here is the level of each kind of personality that they're supposed to have.
Do we ever stop to ask where they're getting any of that from?
No, we don't.
We just go along with it.
So they're making a determination that they're not equipped to make.
And as I said, they are playing on a field that they don't really understand.
And that field is the human mind.
And I say the human mind and not the brain, because, okay, we know we have brains, we have these physical things inside our heads, and we can look at those things and study them and everything else.
But, We know that the brain somehow generates consciousness, okay?
And consciousness is what we call the mind.
Now, here's the thing.
Nobody actually understands how a physical thing like a brain can generate consciousness.
Nobody understands that.
No psychiatrist, no doctor, nobody working at any drug company actually fully understands how a brain can generate consciousness.
This is one of the great mysteries of life.
This is one of the things that people have been debating since the beginning of time.
Yet, with mental disorders, Doctors are trying to treat disorders of consciousness, okay?
Not diseases of the brain.
Now, if ADHD was really a disease of the brain, we would just call it a brain disease.
And there are things that we call brain diseases.
Dementia, for instance, is a brain disease.
So if a patient has dementia, you can do a scan of the brain, you can look at their brain, and you can see it.
But with something like ADHD, You can't really do that.
It's called a mental disorder, because we have decided that the mind isn't functioning how it's supposed to.
But we don't really know how the brain relates to or causes that malfunction.
We don't.
No matter what anyone says, we don't really know.
Because if we did know, they would be able to diagnose ADHD by doing a brain scan.
They wouldn't need to give you a personality survey.
They wouldn't need to ask you questions about how you're doing at school.
They could just look at the brain and see it.
But they don't diagnose it that way, because they can't.
Because nobody really knows what the connection is.
So we have erroneously declared That the mind isn't doing what it's supposed to, and then we have set out to correct the mind, even though we don't really know what the mind is!
And that's what makes a side effect like suicidal thoughts so scary.
How can a drug give somebody a thought?
How can a drug, a pill that you put into your mouth, And not just think something, but have a thought that you want to end your own existence.
I mean, just think about that.
These drug companies are giving things to our kids and telling us that, yeah, it probably won't happen, it's rare, but it could cause your child to think that he wants to end his existence.
How can a drug do that?
They don't know.
They really don't know.
Yet they give it to our kids anyway.
I think you could really make the argument that it is never safe to give something to a child that might cause them to think about suicide.
Even if you tell me that there's only a .0001% chance.
The fact that the drug has that ability, potentially, has that power, and the fact that we understand so little about how it could even do that, I think that's reason enough to, as I said, be extremely cautious with all of this stuff.
There might be, in extreme situations, if a child needs a drug like this, I mean, in a life-saving situation, where there's something going so wrong with a child that they need the drug to save their life, well, then that's one thing.
But the fact that we're being told, give this stuff to your kid so they can do their schoolwork, How is that worth the trade-off?
And, you know, the thing is, even if the drugs don't cause suicidal thoughts, and of course the really scary thing is, it's also hard, you can't really quantify that.
So, doctors might say, yeah, it could cause suicide.
It probably won't.
It's very rare.
Well, how could they really know how rare it is?
How do they know exactly how many kids have had these thoughts after taking these drugs?
Again, they don't know.
No matter what they say, they have no way of knowing.
How are they supposed to know what thoughts are going on inside the head of a kid?
Well, the only way they know is if the kid says it.
But sadly, terribly, as we know with suicidal thoughts, most of the time, people who have these thoughts don't say it.
Either because with a kid they don't really understand what the thought is, they are scared, they're embarrassed, they're whatever.
They don't bring it up.
They're not going to tell you.
So we know that these drugs have that ability.
We know it does happen.
We don't know how often it happens.
We don't actually know how rare it is.
Nobody does.
Because we can't read someone's mind.
But even if... Take ADHD medicine.
Even if it doesn't cause suicidal thoughts.
Either way, the whole idea is that it's altering a child's personality.
So, it's... Just take my son as an example again.
A child who certainly would qualify as ADHD.
Very energetic, running around, talking, all this kind of stuff.
Well, if I give him a drug and suddenly he's not acting that way anymore, well that's a change in personality.
And what it also means, because right now my son runs around, does all that, because he wants to.
Because that's how he wants to express himself.
So if you give him a drug and he stops acting that way, That means he doesn't want to act that way anymore.
So something has happened in his head to make it so that he doesn't desire to be that way anymore, and to act that way.
But again, that's something with consciousness.
Something has been altered in his consciousness to make it so that he desires things differently, and he experiences the world differently, and he sees things differently.
So it's not a simple thing of, oh, it just calms him down.
It's not that simple.
We've clearly altered the way that his mind works, not just his brain, his mind.
And again, nobody knows exactly how that works or what the long-term effects might be.
Nobody knows.
And so I think the drug companies and many doctors are being very cavalier about this.
And although there's so much they don't know, And although there's a lot of information that they do know that should be concerning and should cause them to slow down, but they don't, you know, they just can continue on anyway.
And more and more kids are put on these drugs.
And so I think it's time that we start forcing them to answer some tough questions and we start holding them accountable.
And that's something to think about.
And I would also ask that everyone pray for the family of Maddy Whitsett, who are going through something that no family should ever have to go through.
