From Playground to Pill Bottle: The Psychiatric Takeover of Childhood

We're drugging children to fit into classes, not to help them thrive as human beings. We don't design schools for movement, for imagination, or for emotional adaptability. We design schools for compliance, for test scores, and for silence.

A noncompliant child is a broken child — instead of addressing what's wrong with the system, we focus on what's wrong with the child.

And then we medicate the child.

As psychiatrist and author of Medication Madness, Dr. Peter Breggin, states, "Psychiatric drugs blunt the brain and stifle individuality. Children lose their spontaneity, their spark, their will."

Depression in a 7-Year-Old?

Yes, children do get hurt. Yes, they can be profoundly sad, traumatized, bereaved, and stressed out. But that doesn't mean their feelings are illnesses. Life hurts. Childhood doesn't make sense. The answer is not to declare a 7-year-old has a "chemical imbalance" and give them SSRIs — which, by the way, have black box warnings for increased suicidal ideation in children and adolescents (FDA, 2004).

A landmark study in The Lancet (Cipriani et al., 2016) tested 14 antidepressants on children. Only fluoxetine (Prozac) produced any weak effect, but even that was balanced by risk in the majority of cases.

This isn't medicine. This is officially sanctioned emotional suppression.

What We're Not Talking About

Let's look at what we should be looking at instead:

• Trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) — which increase the risk of emotional distress exponentially.

• Family instability, poverty, and systemic racism — all of which have effects on mental health.

• Neglect of play, nature, and unstructured time.

• Too much screen time and digital overstimulation.

But that requires effort, change, community, and actual care.

Drugs are easier.

The Industry Behind It

Don't be naive. This is not about child welfare. This is a multi-billion-dollar industry.

The global pediatric psychotropic drug market will be valued at $18 billion by 2030 (MarketWatch, 2023). Big Pharma has found its new market: our children. And parents — afraid, tired, desperate to get some help — are reassured that this is "science." That this is "necessary."

Meanwhile, the long-term effects of these drugs on developing brains are hardly understood.

Enough Is Enough

Stop calling it care. Stop calling it treatment. What we're doing is medicalizing childhood and medicating children into submission.

We don't need to "fix" kids. We need to mend the systems that are breaking them.

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• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2022). ADHD Data and Statistics

• FDA. (2004). Public Health Advisory: Worsening Depression and Suicidality in Pediatric Patients Being Treated with Antidepressant Medications

• Cipriani, A., Zhou, X., Del Giovane, C., et al. (2016). Comparative efficacy and tolerability of antidepressants for major depressive disorder in children and adolescents: a network meta-analysis. The Lancet, 388(10047), 881–890.

• Breggin, P. (2008). Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide, and Crime. St. Martin's Press.

• MarketWatch. (2023). Pediatric Mental Health Drug Market Trends.