TOOL OF THE DAY: Drugging Your Child

CATEGORY: Family Law

(This post is being worked on.)

Is the other parent prohibited from getting treatment without your permission? Does the other parent have to inform you of medical conditions of your child? Is your order in enforceable language?

All of these are questions you will want to ask yourself if you find out that the other parent has been getting medication for your child without your knowledge. And if your order requires that both of you agree on the treatment, then you will want to see if that is also a violation of your orders.

The orders that you have regarding the rights and duties of your child are put in place to protect your child.

Let me give you a more specific example of what can happen:

The other parent decides that they are going to take the child to a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists can prescribe medications. The psychiatrist sees your child and on the first visit prescribes medications. Your child is 16 and is told not to tell you about it. Your 16 year old then takes this medication for over a month before something comes up where you find out about it. In this case it might be that the child gets sick and the drug the child was prescribed is on this medical paperwork.

HINT: This is a good reason you need to always get copies of your child’s medical records. This should include the doctor’s notes, all testing done and results, as well as the forms that the other parent filled out the day of the appointment. We learn a lot from these forms like the other parent is not listed on the paperwork at all; not as the other parent and not as an emergency contact, and not on the HIPAA release forms.

Ask yourself:

Does your order state that the other parent has to inform you, has to add you to paperwork. Your order might also have even more specific instructions regarding psychiatry and psychology. And if these are violated and you felt your child has been endangered by the decisions the other parent made, not just the decision to take them there and give permission to start them on a drug, but also the decision to not tell you.

Some of you may not know this but SSRI’s like Lexapro, Prozac, and others, in 2004 were required by the FDA to put a black-box warning on them that they can increase suicide tendencies in teens to young adolescents. From 24 and younger there is a higher risk of them hurting themselves than at older ages.

Also these medications interact with other medications. And, you’ll notice that I call it a drug before this in this post. And that does not mean that it is not a medication for some. This means that these are so frequently prescribed even without real evidence that there is true depression, that it then just becomes a drug. And there are studies that show that when it is prescribed for people who were not depressed that they developed some “adverse mental and neurological effects.” This study was done by David Healy in 2000, from the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine.

It is very, very dangerous for one parent to not inform the other parent.