The Denver Post’s Jennifer Brown and Christopher N. Osher are no strangers to Colorado’s child welfare system. In 2012, the two teamed up for “Failed to Death,” an investigative series on the preventable deaths of abused and neglected children.
While working on that series, they were tipped off to another disturbing trend: children in Colorado’s foster care system were 12 times more likely to receive psychotropic and antipsychotic drugs like Adderall, Risperdal and Zyprexa than other children on Medicaid.
The idea for the series, “Prescription Kids,” stemmed from Dr. Bruce Perry who studied the impact of child abuse on child development, said Osher. “The way [children] interact with the world and act looks like mental illness when really it’s more of a symptom of post traumatic stress disorder or something like that.”
[For more of this story, written by Asha Glover, go to http://www.journalismcenter.or...at-prescription-kids]
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