There were frequent visits with psychiatrists, and when she met with Dr. Eliot Moon, she remembers getting a sweet, a prescription and being sent on her way.
“I just went to his office, took my piece of candy and let him tell me what medication I’d be on,” recalled Tasia, who said the doctor would tell her the treatment was for “bad behavior.”
“He didn’t ask us why we did what we did, or anything like that.” She felt like “it was set in stone. He has to put you on a med.”
Now 27, Tasia is sharing the story of her emotionally fragile childhood under the care of one of California’s highest prescribers of antipsychotic medications to foster children — the latest installment of the Bay Area News Group’s ongoing investigative series “Drugging Our Kids.”
A new investigation of the prescribing habits of 1,280 doctors and nurse practitioners, published Sunday, showed Moon was among a select group: 120 psychiatrists who were responsible about 50 percent of the time when a foster child received antipsychotics. The powerful psychiatric drugs often come with debilitating side effects for children.
Tasia was 6 when social workers wrested her from a single mother with drug problems. The little girl arrived at the Hillsides residential group home in Pasadena, with a nurse noting in her files that Tasia “appears bright, answers questions, smiles. … Says she has no aches, pains or problems.”
She left the group home 13 years later, morbidly obese, with Type 2 diabetes and medication-induced tremors.
[For more of this story, written by Karen De Sa, go to http://extras.mercurynews.com/druggedkids/part7.html]
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