When does your child really need medication?

Apr 21 2010

By Candy Lashkari

A frightening number of parents are over-medicating their young children today. Many parents are considering medication for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and for those children showing signs of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Journalist Louis Theroux is taking a television viewers on an investigative journey through children who are under medication to modify their behavior.

Considering that all children tend to be somewhat competitive and self obsessed, where does one draw the line? Is medication that is going to curb and alter a child’s normal and natural reaction to situations just so that he can fit in better in to societal norms really worth giving the child? Or would it be better to allow the child to grow up showing his natural attitude and learning to deal with it when he gets social criticism.

The cases that come on the show are extreme, and so many of the kids may really need the medication they are on to function normally. Yet there are enough kids out there who are intelligent and ill tempered. Does that mean that they need to be drugged into becoming socially more acceptable? Will it not help if the parents worked on the behavioral problem and not resorted to medication?

It may in some cases and it may not in others. Louis Theroux takes you through many cases where young children are being medicated. It asks you to think if what is being done is right. Does the country need a generation of mind controlled people who have had all individuality stamped out of them via medication? Just so that they behave according to the society codes for proper behavior?

The show makes you wonder if the parents are taking the easy way out to control their children with the use of drugs. Labels like Oppositional Defiant Disorder allow the doctors to prescribe medication, while being labeled a brat would just be an added headache for the parents to handle. Think about it, would you medicate your child just so that you could manage him or her better?