psychotropic

As the California Assembly struggles to begin creating new laws on Monday amid the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic, lawmakers are being urged to select only the most vital-to-the-times bills. To contain infections that have topped 43,000 in the state, there will be masks and gloves, and people seated far from each other in cavernous hearing rooms.

In the Bronx, Pedro Maldonado’s story of diagnosis and prescription for Concerta and Seroquel — typically prescribed for ADHD and mood disorders like schizophrenia — started when he was in foster care at age 6.

Missouri has reached a settlement in a class-action lawsuit that litigants hope will set some precedent on a once-hot-button subject in child welfare: the use of psychotropic medication to treat youth in foster care.

A federal judge has granted class-action status to a lawsuit regarding alleged overuse of psychotropic medication by Missouri’s child welfare agency. United States District Judge Nanette Laughrey announced in a decision dated July 19 that the plaintiffs in the case will include “all children in … foster care custody who presently are, or will be, prescribed or administered one or more psychotropic medications while in state care.”

The trauma that children and youth in foster care experience is a serious issue which deserves not only our attention, but our concerted action to eliminate it. A recent article in the San Jose Mercury News (SJMN) suggests that Hillsides and a consulting psychiatrist contributed to this trauma after psychotropic medication was prescribed to a former resident who was discharged from our care eight years ago.

The Imprint is highlighting each of the policy recommendations made this summer by the participants of the Foster Youth Internship Program (FYI), a group of 12 former foster youths who completed congressional internships.

The over-reliance on psychotropic medication for children in foster care has been drawing a lot of attention both among policymakers and in the media. A recent study reports that in 2012, Pennsylvania’s foster children were nearly three times as likely to be prescribed psychotropic drugs for behavior problems as other children on Medicaid.

Starting in August of 2014, San Jose Mercury News reporter Karen de Sá produced a five-part investigative series on the use of psychotropic drugs among California’s foster youth called Drugging Our Kids.

In late December, six-year-old Kendrea Johnson was found dead, hanging by a jump rope from the ceiling of her room in a Brooklyn Park, Minn. foster home. The police have decided it was not a homicide, and that it was either a suicide or an accident.