Drugs Used in Group and Foster Homes

* Re “Caretakers Routinely Drug Foster Children,” May 17:

One question that occurred to me immediately is the issue of incentives to use pharmaceutical drugs offered by the drug companies and their detail men. What kind of rewards are available to doctors who are heavy prescribers of the various prescription drugs being given to these children?

What is happening to the licenses of foster care providers who have given drugs to children without approval? And what has happened to the psychiatrists who have done so? Who are the dependency court judges who have not been as vigilant as they should have been?

Earlier, The Times has reported on murders and deaths in foster care situations across the county. How would we know if unapproved drugs were being given to those children, as they were to the unfortunate 9-year-old who stabbed someone after being on a high dose of Ritalin for weeks?

JOE SHEA

Hollywood

* The majority of the blame for the drugging of children in group and foster homes should be placed on the field of psychiatry. This profession has created a superfluous amount of diagnoses of disorders, most of which are unlikely to be real disorders. And sadly, the abuse of power that psychiatrists enjoy in our society--power which enables them to have free rein to pathologize virtually every aspect of human emotion and behavior--has given places like these group homes a convenient means to chemically control their young residents.

It worries me when I consider what could happen to a child who isn’t lucky enough to get adopted and continues to be drugged presumedly until age 18, when he or she can finally leave the group home. Many of these kids are not going to function very well out in the community after being on the drugs for so long. Some could end up becoming part of the homeless population. And since psychiatry has already been victimizing the homeless by turning unfortunate living circumstances such as having to take shelter under a bridge into a mental disorder, these kids could end up in yet another facility where they will be drugged.

M.L. HERRING

Orange

* Thank you for your editorial condemnation (May 19) of prescription writing in the absence of personal clinical assessment.

But physicians prescribing psychiatric medications are not necessarily psychiatrists, which the editorial appears to suggest. Indeed, a welcome journalistic follow-up would be a statistical breakdown of the qualifications of the physicians prescribing psychotropic medications for county wards in group and foster care.

SAUL ISAAC HARRISON MD

33rd McGavin Awardee, Child

and Adolescent Psychiatric Career

Pacific Palisades