Editor’s Note: Southern California Group’s sister publications in the San Francisco Bay Area produced this report, the latest installment intheir series investigating doctors’ use of powerful anti-psychotic drugs to control the behavior of the state’s foster children.
For years, few questioned how doctors treated the emotional trauma of California’s abused and neglected children — and nobody monitored how often they handed out psychiatric drugs that can turn fragile childhoods into battles with obesity and bouts of stupor.
Now, a Digital First Media investigation into the prescribing habits of the state’s foster care doctors reveals for the first time how a fraction of doctors has been fueling the rampant medicating of California’s most vulnerable kids.
A mere 10 percent of the state’s highest prescribers were responsible about 50 percent of the time when a foster child received an antipsychotic, the riskiest class of psychiatric drugs with some of the most harmful side effects. The startling numbers are revealed as part of a new analysis of Medi-Cal pharmacy data, which the news organization obtained through a public records request.
These same doctors often relied on risky, unproven combinations of the drugs, a practice widely rejected by medical associations and other states.
In San Bernardino County, one psychiatrist prescribed antipsychotics to 328 foster children — 85 percent of the patients to whom he gave a psychiatric drug in the five years the investigation examined. And when one antipsychotic didn’t work — or wasn’t enough — Dr. Warris Walayat routinely prescribed another.
[For more of this story, written by Karen de Sá and Tracy Seipel, go to http://www.dailynews.com/healt...-with-antipsychotics]
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