Insel of NIMH Misses the Mark: Medication as Social Control

Tom Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH,) in his recent blog post Are Children Overmedicated? seems to suggest that perhaps more psychiatric medication is in order. Comparing mental illness in children to food allergies, he dismisses the "usual" explanations given for the increase prescribing of medication.  In his view these explanations are; blaming psychiatrists who are too busy to provide therapy, parents who are too busy to provide a stable home environment, drug companies for marketing their products, and schools for lack of recess.  Concluding that perhaps the explanation for increase in prescribing of psychiatric medication to children is a greater number of children with serious psychiatric illness,  he shows a lack of recognition of the complexity of the situation. 

When a recent New York Times article, that Insel makes reference to, reported on the rise in prescribing of psychiatric medication for toddlers diagnosed with ADHD, with a disproportionate number coming from families of poverty, one clinician remarked that if this is an attempt to medicate social and economic issues, then we have a huge problem. He was on to something.

In conversations with pediatricians (the main prescribers of these medications) and child psychiatrists on the front lines, I find many in a reactive stance. When people feel overwhelmed, they go in to survival mode, with their immediate aim just to get through the day.  They find themselves prescribing medication because they have no other options.

From many I have heard some variation of this statement:  "In light of my inability to address the family dynamics and social-economic circumstances, all I have available is medications to help with the child’s symptoms. I see patients who come from unstable environments, where parents are themselves stressed and overwhelmed. I recognized that a child's “difficult,” “impulsive,” “oppositional” behavior is most often a communication about family, social, and economic stressors that are making a child's family less competent at caring for him. However, I lack the resources or the tools to do anything about these overwhelming issues. I hate that feeling of impotence.  So I use the only tool I have, medication. When I can bear to think about it, I recognized that medication is just shutting off the child's efforts to tell me something – in effect silencing his voice- and that I have become a force for social control."

When that child is in a school setting, with a high student-teacher ratio, perhaps also with teachers who have little experience working with kids from stressed family backgrounds who are struggling with emotional regulation, the pressure to control the child’s behavior increases significantly. It is not simply that schools have reduced unstructured time (though this is a problem as well.) Medication again becomes an agent of social control. Rather than devote the resources to address the underlying issues, we can use the medication, so effective in the short term, to silence the children.

Insel also does not address contemporary research demonstrating the developmental and relational nature of emotional and behavioral problems in children, well known within the discipline of infant mental health. Referring to "biomarkers" he seems to have an idea that one day we may be able to test for mental illness in children with a blood test or a brain scan.   The importance of safe, secure primary caregiving relationships in healthy emotional development is supported by an abundance of research in neuroscience, genetics, and developmental psychology, One cannot treat emotional and behavioral problems in children by treating only the child.

As knowledge about early childhood mental health makes its way in to mainstream health care, there have been calls for universal screening. But if we are using medication as an agent of social control, we need to be very careful not to put the cart before the horse. 

If we do not first have a health care system, and an education system, that has time and space to listen, to support parents, to appreciate the complex interplay of biological vulnerability and environmental stress, to understand the meaning of a child's behavior, what may happen is that the huge numbers of children who screen positive will have no meaningful, relationship-based treatment available (and the medication/talk therapy dichotomy is another oversimplification- there are multiple evidence-based interventions that support parent-child relationships.)  This together with universal preschool has the potential, unless there is significant change, to result in massive numbers of young children silenced by psychiatric medication.

I wonder if Dr. Insel is himself feeling overwhelmed. Perhaps he realizes that the increase in children with emotional and behavioral challenges, as well as medicating of these children, is a symptom of an enormous social problem. That problem is our society's undervaluing of children and parents, our failure to devote resources to support healthy growth and development, described by Elizabeth Young Breuhl as childism, or prejudice against children. He has good reason to feel overwhelmed with this realization, as it makes his task as director of the NIMH exponentially larger. 

Psychiatric Medication For Children? Important New Book Gives Pause

Two things most stood out for me in Kaitlin Bell Barnett's new book Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up. The first is the stories of women struggling to get off of SSRI's (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors), started in early adolescence, when they decide to get pregnant. The second is Bell Barnett's review of the literature regarding sexual dysfunction as a side effect of SSRIs in adolescence.

The book as a whole has much to say that is very important. As I write in my blurb for the cover:

Dosed is a fascinating, well-researched, and very important book. After reading it, I hope that no parent, pediatrician or psychiatrist will give psychiatric medication to a child or adolescent without very careful consideration of the potential long-term consequences. Bell Barnett shows that these medications are often not a ‘quick fix,’ but rather have deep, lasting impact, not only on physical and emotional health, but also on a person’s core sense of self.

Bell Barnett is a journalist who was herself started on SSRIs as a teenager. Her book intertwines in depth interviews with people who were started on psychiatric medication in childhood and are now young adults, with a journalistic study of the history of psychiatric medication use in children. I could probably write several posts covering all the important issues she addresses, but have chosen to focus on these two.

I first learned of the emerging evidence that SSRIs may cause long term sexual dysfunction last fall when I attended a talk by Robert Whitaker, author of the controversial book about psychiatric illness and medication Anatomy of an Epidemic. I was so alarmed about this data that I wanted to immediately write a blog post about it. But shortly after that talk I received the galleys of Bell Barnett's book. I discovered that she has a through review of the rather scant literature on the subject along with some very poignant stories, so I decided to wait until her book came out. I recommend that anyone who is concerned about this issue (as anyone who takes or prescribes these drugs should be) read her book. The subject is covered in the chapter entitled "Side Effects." Here are a few sample quotes.

A comprehensive review of the literature conducted in 2004 found just one clinical trial that reported erectile dysfunction in a teenager; most clinical guidelines and reviews of SSRIs didn't mention sexual side effects at all.

This is pretty shocking since, as the authors of the study cited above noted, anywhere from 30-40 percent of adults experience some kind of SSRI induced problems with libido, arousal, or orgasm.

And this important point:

Despite the lack of formal studies involving young people, anecdotal evidence suggests that drugs causing decreased libido and sexual dysfunction do sometimes pose a real problem, psychologically and socially, both for teenagers who are in the process of developing a sexual identity and for young adults testing out long-term intimate relationships.

And this from Elizabeth, who started taking SSRIs in 9th grade:

I am not sure I can [over]state the extent to which it impacted things. I didn't grow up with a normal sex drive, and that was obviously due to a combination of factors, but being on and off antidepressants whose impact I really couldn't understand back when I didn't have any real understanding of my sex drive or sex in relationships to begin with means I basically went through adolescence without experiencing anything in that realm in a "normal' way.

There's more, but the bottom line is that this issue is not well studied and yet of major significance in adolescent development.

Bell-Barnett poignantly captures the challenges faced by her interviewees who were started on SSRIs in childhood and now want to have children. Aware of the potential effects on the developing fetus, they try to get off the medication, but rebound with debilitating symptoms of depression. SSRIs are one of the most common medications prescribed in pregnancy. Yet we really do not know what the effects are on the developing fetus. A policy statement put out by the American Academy of Pediatrics earlier this year points to evidence that SSRI use in the third trimester is linked to a constellation of neonatal signs and symptoms. We do know that maternal depression itself can have a negative impact on the developing fetus. So if a woman is already on SSRIs and develops symptoms of depression without them, it may be best to stay on them during pregnancy.

The take home point of Bell Barnett's book, however, is that this issue needs to be considered by parents and clinicians when girls are prescribed these medications in childhood and adolescence well before having children is on their minds. These medications have a great allure as they may very quickly resolve symptoms. But one thing that Bell Barnett makes clear, and that is also supported by the literature, is that getting off these medications is very difficult.

Certainly these children and teenager should get help if they are struggling with depression. But other forms of intervention, including psychodynamic psychotherapy combined with self-regulating activities such as yoga, offer an alternative to medication. There is a severe shortage of quality mental health services due in part to the influence of the health insurance industry. It is a complex issue that must be addressed at the level of health care policy.

Large-scale use of these medications has major life-long impact on identity and sense of self of the current generation, referred to as "Generation Rx." Considering the complex issue of SSRIs in pregnancy, there is also potential for significant impact on the next generation. The time to pay attention to this problem is now. Reading Bell Barnett's book is a good place to start.