In July, the Washington Post reported that Corporate America is hoarding a record $1.8 trillion in cash while it waits for profit-making opportunities. At the same time, record numbers of American children are being prescribed toxic psychiatric drugs at earlier ages. These two facts are connected.
The corporate class steal trillions by exploiting workers at home and abroad, paying them less than their labor is worth, and by laying off workers and squeezing the rest to work harder and longer for less.
They also steal from our children.
Exploitation and deprivation cause parents to be distressed, discouraged, anxious, overwhelmed, and angry.
An estimated 15 million American children (one in five) live with an adult who suffered a major depression in the previous year. A report from the Urban Institute found that 7 percent of all 9-month-old infants live with severely depressed mothers, and 41 percent of 9-month-old infants live with mothers who suffer some form of depression. These rates are higher among mothers living in poverty, who are also more likely to suffer domestic violence.
Children respond to parental distress with symptoms and behaviors. The greater the parent’s distress, the greater the child’s distress.
Instead of demanding that the corporate ‘surplus’ be used to support families, the medical system labels distressed children with mental disorders and drugs them into submission.
For several decades, researchers Peter and Ginger Breggin have documented the shocking extent to which psychoactive drugs, including powerful ‘antipsychotics,’ are being prescribed to American children.
In adults, these drugs are known to increase the risk of stroke, cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, suicide, seizures, infection, kidney failure, nervous-system damage, and sudden death. The effects on children are unknown.
Last September, an FDA report found that the number of ‘antipsychotic’ prescriptions dispensed to children (0-17 years) had risen 22 percent over the previous 5 years.
The FDA examined 6 of these drugs: Seroquel® (quetiapine); Zyprexa® (olanzapine); Risperdal® (risperidone); Abilify® (aripiprazole); Geodon® (ziprasidone); and Invega® (paliperidone). Of the 32 million prescriptions dispensed for these drugs in 2008, 4.8 million were dispensed to children (15 percent of the total).
When we look at individuals, one million children were prescribed ‘antipsychotics” (19 percent of the total of 5.5 million individuals). Here are the numbers, by age group:
- 1,770 children aged 0-2
- 64,664 children aged 3-6
- 414,451 children aged 7-12
- 540,760 children aged 13-17
‘Diagnoses’ applied to the infants and toddlers (aged 0-2) included: Attention Deficit Disorder; Mental/Behavior Problems, Behavioral Problems; Other Emotional Disturbances, and Residual Schizophrenia, a diagnosis that can be made on the basis of “odd beliefs and unusual perceptual experiences.”
A more accurate diagnosis for these children’s symptoms and behaviors would be “Severe Parental Distress due to Heartless Capitalist Policies.”
The use of atypical antipsychotics for children should be banned.
A report by Dr. Cooper at Vanderbilt University states that 2.5 million children are now taking atypical antipsychotics. Over half are being given them for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Zyprexa was pushed by Lilly Drug Reps. They called it the “Five at Five” (5 mg at 5 pm to keep nursing home patients subdued and sleepy) and “VIVA ZYPREXA” (Zyprexa for everybody) campaigns to off-label market Eli Lilly Zyprexa as a fix for unapproved usage
WARNING-
If a drug (Zyprexa) lists anything about the pancreas among the side effects, it probably means it can cause diabetes. Unlike your liver, the pancreas does not regenerate itself. If it gets damaged, diabetes is very likely.
As our culture’s social engineer, the mental health enterprise (and what an enterprise it is) has made its principal mission of transforming moral issues into health issues, with the respective “treatment”.
In effect, the paradigmatic approach is one of altering the individual, thereby altering the social.
Such an “therapeutic” approach ultimately leaves many of the social, economic, and political questions unanswered, and makes for continued profits and professional prestige.
But it must be asked: cui bono? (who profits?)
Einstein’s wise, and, I would say, self-evident truths illustrate just why he was a socialist. The ability to empathise with others, to not be indifferent to their fate, and to share their joys and sorrows, has always been seen by religions and philosophies as amongst the highest manifestations of morality and humanity.
On the other hand, to see other human beings, other animals and the natural world, as totally ‘other’ and alien, and hence fearful and hostile, is the mark of the little man, the scared, alienated and aggressive outsider whose ego refuses to allow itself to be subsumed by existence.
This type is the bedrock of what we euphemistically call ‘the Right’ and of the business caste and their flunkies. They hate and fear everything outside their own ego, because the notion of a surrender to the rest of the cosmos so fearfully reminds them of their mortality,of how brief and tenuous is their span on earth. They pile up loot, insatiably, stolen from other people and the natural world, as a sort of existential security blanket to protect themselves from the horrors of death and decay. This necessity is, of course, open-ended and unslakeable, hence the ever growing greed of the kleptocrats.
The essential antipathy of this type to others is nowhere more poignantly destructive than in their assaults on children. Not only do they drug them, or sexually exploit them,or kill them for their organs,or spray them with white phosphorus,or depleted uranium, but they also pollute their minds and souls with violent ‘entertainment’, pornography carelessly made accessible and the psychological child abuse of manipulative advertising.
Children have been prematurely and destructively sexualised by the amoral advertising seducers, just to have them become a new ‘demographic’ to keep those lovely profits rolling in. And, cap in hand with the advertising molesters are the dietary and physiological abusers who peddle the addictive poison of junk food. These drug pushers, unlike those who supply cocaine or ecstasy, but like those tempting us with alcohol and tobacco, are not punished for their crimes, but richly rewarded and advantaged by the politicians that they buy and sell with their political contributions.
All in all, in a capitalist pathocracy, child abuse is ubiquitous, conscienceless and immensely profitable.
What has not been sucked into the orbit of psychiatrization in our culture? Psychiatry has led itself down a path of moral and ethical bankrupcy, all in the name of “therapy”.
There isn’t anything that escapes the scrutiny of a thoroughgoing medicalization of everyday life.
The manufacture and promotion of the myth of mental illness, somehow lurking in every individual, has, thus far made good therapeutic sense and paid handsome dividends.