Emotional and Physical Abuse

A prevalent danger is that many facilities for children in state custody or foster homes try to placate children with heavy psychotropic drugs, often just to make them easier to manage.

“When taken from the home, a child suffers trauma and begins misbehaving in the foster home,” said Suzanne Shell from the Family Advocacy Center. “Social services does not recognize this and says it is from the trauma suffered at home. So when the child gets out of control, they put him on drugs,” worsening the situation.

Children under the influence of psychiatric drugs have suffered drug-induced psychosis, hallucinations, abnormal heart activity, uncontrollable tremors, liver problems and other “complications,” including death.

Judges in Los Angeles County were so concerned about the wholesale drugging of children in the system that they implemented a program which requires each psychiatric diagnosis and prescription be reviewed by the county psychiatrist before court approval. It does not, however, appear to have helped. A 1997 Los Angeles grand jury reported that an audit of 158 cases found that in nearly half of the cases the children were drugged without the required legal consent.

An in-depth investigation conducted by The Los Angeles Times in May 1998 found that thousands of children in state foster or group homes were being administered powerful psychiatric drugs, mostly for the purpose of making the kids easier to manage. In Los Angeles County alone, dependency court judges approved requests to medicate 4,500 children in one year.

The Los Angeles County’s child protective system came under renewed scrutiny and criticism in January 2000 in a report issued by the LA County Board of Supervisors-appointed Foster Care Task Force. The task force, formed after an alarming increase in deaths of children in foster care between May and August 1999, charged that safeguards are lacking and that children in foster care have no greater protection than other children in the community.

continued...

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