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Weighing Your Options

An Excerpt From Should I Medicate My Child? Sane Solutions for Troubled Kids With and Without Psychiatric Drugs

By Lawrence H. Diller

Applying good judgment to an antibiotic is not as difficult: It attacks an identifiable agent of disease; it targets bacteria that produce recognizable symptoms; and its side effects and contraindications are well known. Not so for psychiatric drugs. Psychiatric drugs do not target an invasive organism. Rather, they are directed toward the child's brain, the very center of personality and of the functions that define who we are.

There are no clear tests, no X-rays, no MRI scans that tell us when a child should be labeled with a certain behavioral or emotional condition or receive psychoactive medication. Although we can hazard some good guesses about their efficacy, we do not know for sure if many of these drugs actually improve the problems for which they are prescribed. None of us doctors, parents, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, lawmakers knows for certain what kinds of long-term side effects these drugs might cause when given to children, with their still developing bodies and brains. If psychiatric drugs are tools, they do not come with a clear set of instructions. The best we can do is to think thoroughly through what we know about the side effects, the benefits and the dangers of withholding medication from a child in trouble while constantly reminding ourselves of all that we do not know.