Who diagnosed this three-year-old kid (referenced in the last graph) with bipolar disorder?? Can someone in the medical professions please tell me a way in which this makes sense? Three-year olds are all over the place mentally because they're, um, three-year-olds.
And it only makes the cake taste better to know poor kids get drugged at twice the rate of their richer counterparts. I imagine that happens with adults, too, but I've not seen any research to that effect. Read for yourself, in the NY Times.
New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.
Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?
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