My hospital has, among other distinctions, a pediatric psych unit. You may well ask, what on earth is a pediatric psych unit? Now that it’s fashionable to diagnose not only 15-year-olds, not only 10-year-olds, but even 7 and 5-year-olds with psychiatric diseases, sooner or later children will turn up who are “not doing well on medications,” and by somebody’s standard need to be admitted to the hospital.
It makes me sick to see these poor children in the ER with this diagnosis on their charts. To my mind, drugging your 7-year-old with high-powered anti-schizophrenic medications like abilify and zyprexa (remember the horrible side effect profile of most of these drugs: zyprexa is well-proven to cause diabetes, for instance) is downright child abuse; not to mention then allowing strangers to incarcerate them in a “hospital” because they’re not behaving the way you want them to.
The usual story is that they’re being violent at school: kicking, hitting, maybe even biting the staff. Folks, since when is a 50-pound child a threat to anyone? Are you really telling me you can’t control a normal-sized first grader? You have to admit him to the hospital for this? The problem with these children is that their parents are too lazy to discipline them properly. I support corporal punishment; which these children clearly haven’t had enough of. Now, once they’re this violent, I could see an argument that more violence of any kind in response won’t help. Ok, fine. But I guarantee you that anyone, if put in an empty room and left strictly alone, will quiet down sooner or later. Maybe two hours later. But far better that their parents or teachers should spend that time watching out of the corner of their eye (rather than giving the child a wrestling match and a shouting match, the way he wants), than that these little children should be institutionalized at this age.
Can you think of a worse thing to do to a child who’s already having trouble adjusting to the world, whose family situation is no doubt very fluid and unreliable, than to take him away from everything he knows and put him in the four walls of a hospital?
The crowning irony is that these children, here in the ER, seem well-behaved. They’re not bouncing off the walls, or yelling, or demanding anything. They sit quietly, smile at us, cooperate with everything. If there’s any point where they can be got to do this, then with proper encouragement, they can do it all the time. Most often, their family will say in bewilderment that the child is fairly cooperative at home; maybe annoying, but not completely out of hand. It’s only at school that they go completely wild. Maybe because they’re locked up all day with peers who are having just as much trouble as them?
These children are being abused. I hate to think of what their lives will be like in ten or fifteen years, when they become young adults who’ve never been given the chance to cope with the world except through the film of psychiatric drugs.
January 1, 2008 at 12:40 am
I had polio at six months, surgeries on my foot at ages 3 and 5 years and another hospital stay (all for four months each) at age 8. Each time, my mother took me in for a “checkup” then turned and left me there at the hospital. I saw no one from family or friends for the duration. This practice apparently was the norm, to avoid “upsetting” children. Needless to say, that first abandonment effectively destroyed my trust in my parents and anyone else. If we children cried for our parents our beds were pushed into a huge bath room, lights out, and told the “redman” would get us if we didn’t shut up. Otherwise, no mistreatment.
When I grew up, married and had children, two of them had hospital stays, for tonsillectomies. I never left their bedsides, despite staff’s insistence that I was required to do so.
While you very rightly complain that children are needlessly institutionalized today, another side of it is that children are being essentially abandoned to institutions. In my case, my parents were devastated at leaving me (that didn’t change how I experienced the situation), but felt they had no choice. Today’s parents seem relieved to be rid temporarily of responsibility.
January 2, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Maggie – Your experience sounds horrifying. And yes, that’s exactly what’s so sad about the children I saw: their parents seem relieved, not upset, at the prospect of abandoning their children in the hospital.
January 3, 2008 at 12:29 am
If I hadn’t pulled my oldest son out of school (to homeschool him) when I did, he likely would have required hospitalization to deal with the effects of school. He was being bullied and the principal’s comment about one particularly heinous incident was “boys will be boys”
I informed her that in future, she would deal with the bully – or the police would. Not long afterwards, I decided that we’d all be happier if I homeschooled him. I know that’s not possible for many families, but it was certainly worth the effort for us.