A new ‘mental illness’ means young kids can now be given a dangerous drug

What does the FDA do with a drug that has so many side effects that its label is 38 pages long?

Why, give it the okay to be prescribed to kids, of course. Kids as young at 10.

Oh, and have it come in cherry-flavored tablets that melt in your mouth.

The recent approval of the terribly dangerous antipsychotic drug called Saphris for children is a much bigger deal than just another use for a risky med.

It’s about a horrible new trend – the latest and greatest mental illness fad to come down the pike for kids since ADHD.

And it’s about the millions of innocent children who will pay the price for Big Pharma’s greed.

The newest ‘epidemic’

It was a perfect storm.

And the first step was to “find” the illness.

In the mid ‘90s the idea first popped up that children as young as two might possibly have bipolar disorder.

At that time, only a couple of doctors attending an annual conference for child psychiatrists claimed they had ever even seen a child with bipolar disorder. But certainly, the group speculated, they must be out there.

And they closed the meeting by vowing to be on the lookout for more.

Three short years later, this new mental disease for kids was in full swing. The “diagnosis” had officially arrived.

One doctor at a later meeting said he had “never witnessed anything like the tidal wave of unwarranted enthusiasm” for this new finding of bipolar disorder in so many children.

In another three years, the “epidemic” had increased 40-fold.

In 1995, only 20,000 kids were said to suffer from it. By 2003, amazingly over 800,000 were.

But you don’t get to these kinds of numbers without a “disease” leader. And that would be Dr. Joseph Biederman, from the very prestigious Harvard Medical School.

And the fact that Dr. Biederman was called on the carpet for failing to report that he received $1.6 million from Big Pharma hasn’t dimmed the enthusiasm one iota.

Biederman’s “punishment,” after a three-year U.S. Senate investigation, was to write a letter of apology to the Harvard faculty (you can’t make this stuff up!).  He also was forbidden to take any more Big Pharm dollars…for one entire year.

And that brings us back to cherry-flavored Saphris.

By now, thanks in large part to Dr. Biederman’s well-compensated efforts, the rush to treat all these bipolar kids borders on hysteria. So a little over a week ago the FDA gave the green light for doctors to prescribe Saphris to children as young as 10.

And it did so after a safety trial that lasted only three weeks!

Yes, you read that right. In just 21 days drugmaker Actavis was able to “prove” to the FDA that this dangerous med was fine for 10-year-olds to take.

And when you hear the side effects Saphris can cause, just about the only thing to say is what one doctor did when he heard the news: “Shame on you, FDA.”

This med is known to cause severe reactions such as “neuroleptic malignant syndrome.” That’s a life-threatening disorder that can alter your mental state, causing muscular rigidity, super-low body temperatures and delirium that can progress to a coma.

It can also affect the heart, liver, cause suicidal behavior and involuntary, repetitive body movements that sometimes never go away.

And that’s just the short list.

It looks like it wasn’t enough to give millions of kids dangerous drugs for ADHD. Now, they can also be given a candy-flavored dose of Saphris.

And also have to live with the stigma of being “diagnosed” with a serious mental illness for the rest of their lives.

That is, if they survive childhood.

Source:

“FDA okays Saphris for pediatric bipolar disorder” Caroline Cassels, March 13, 2015, Medscape, Medscape.com