“Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.”
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Doctors are prescribing a family of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, for children as young as one year of age and in some cases even younger. Why are one-year-old children on antidepressants?
Follow the money.
One supplement available at most health food stores is 5-HTP, which does essentially everything SSRIs do but at a cost that is much less—around $18 a bottle—and is much safer in relation to the known side effects of its prescription counterpart. A prescription for Zoloft, for example, costs about $197 for a comparable bottle of over-the-counter supplements.
SSRIs, and the over-the counter version 5-HTP, are a family of drugs that treat depression. They accomplish this by affecting the neurotransmitters in the brain by blocking the re-absorption of a chemical called serotonin, allowing more serotonin to be available. Serotonin is the key to mood regulation.
The three main drugs used to treat depression are paroxetine (Paxil), fluoxetine (Prozac), and sertraline (Zoloft).
Although most teenagers and adults will experience depression at some point in their lives, the need to take these mind-altering drugs is only necessary in extreme cases. Extreme cases arise when the depression is so severe that it affects the person’s ability to function in society and there may also be thoughts of suicide. Yet the medical community seems to reach for the prescription pad whenever depression is noted, whether minor or acute.
The reason I have written this article is due to the abuse of prescriptions to the effect that the medical establishment is writing prescriptions for these mood-elevating drugs for children one year of age and even younger; again, I have to ask why they would put young children on antidepressants.
What child one year old would have thoughts of suicide or be so depressed that he or she can’t function in their limited range of society?
By 2013, the medical establishment already had 274,804 children one year old or younger on antidepressant drugs. To me, this is outrageous and should invoke public ire.
But where is the public outcry?
Is it that the public is not aware of the extent the medical establishment is abusing their prescription privileges or that the pharmaceutical industry is allowing it?
We appear to be learning the hard way that drugs and children are a dangerous combination. The medical establishment is putting children on antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft—drugs known to cause psychosis. In some cases, as these children age they experience mania, a heightened state of euphoric delusions, and illusions of reality rather than reality itself. An otherwise serene child may take on a sense of aggression: to him or her, there is a real possibility that life seems like a video game and that nothing may seem real.
In the case of a one-year-old child, life would be like a cartoon. But while characters in real life would die, a cartoon character has immortality, so children on antidepressants in a developmental stage learn that violence isn’t real and that death is an illusion.
Life is not a video game or a cartoon world. When someone kills in the real world, that death is permanent.
But why is it that some children on antidepressants will kill while others don’t?
Science currently does not know the answer, but we have the question. I surmise there are additional unknowns such as outside influences like the introduction of alcohol or non-compatible drugs—perhaps heroin, cocaine, or even marijuana or amphetamines. We simply don’t know.
The problem may stem from the duality early in our history when the medical establishment vied for control of our health care and naturopaths lost an important foothold in becoming an equal partner, providing treatment that actually sought the cause rather than the effect of physical distress.
In my mind, the medical community is too quick to write prescriptions, and it frightens me to consider that they would put one-year-old children on antidepressants. Conventional medicine treats symptoms alone, but they use drugs or surgery to do so. Naturopathic medicine treats the root cause of health issues so that the body can heal itself.
For example, with cancer there is pain; pain pills mask the pain, but the cancer continues to fester and develop until the body is so ravaged that death is a certainty. Now consider: Is this what happens with real depression? If children on antidepressants truly have a chemical imbalance in the brain, these drugs will mask it, not cure it, so that a mental explosion could be building below the surface.
Michael Moore, in addressing the twelfth anniversary of the Columbine tragedy, said “On this 12-year anniversary of the shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, let us not forget the real lesson of Columbine: psychiatric drugs induce violence.”
We are not addressing the drug problem. Rather, the liberal establishment, which blames society rather than the individual, is attempting to make an argument to further their fallible agenda that if we remove guns from civilized people we will somehow be safer. For these individuals, their fantasy aberration has gained an unsteady foothold in their logic.
The FDA issued a Public Health Advisory in 2004 warning that both adults and youth being treated with antidepressants reported anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, impulsivity, akathisia, hypomania, and mania.
We can identify the problem very quickly. It relates to our prescription-drug culture.
Following is a very small list of known school homicides committed by individuals on antidepressant or antipsychotic drugs like Hydroxyzine, Wellbutrin, Prozac, Risperdal, and Zoloft.
—Myron May, on November 20, 2014, wounded three before police shot and killed him.
—Aaron Ybarra, on June 5, 2014, killed one student and wounded two others.
—Jose Reyes, on October 21, 2013, killed a teacher and wounded two classmates before committing suicide.
—Christian Helms, on September 21, 2011, had two pipe bombs in his backpack and shot his school’s police officer.
—Hammad Memon, on February 5, 2010, shot and killed Todd Brown.
The list is endless.
Police found psychiatric drugs in the apartment of the Aurora, Colo. movie theater shooter James Holmes—including the anti-anxiety drug clonazepam and the antidepressant sertraline, the generic version of the antidepressant Zoloft.
The requests for the release of Sandy Hook school shooter Adam Lanza’s toxicology reports and medical history to ascertain whether psychiatric drugs played a role in the school massacre have been denied by the Connecticut medical examiner, prompting a conclusion that they don’t want the public to know that drugs were also responsible for that violent episode.
Between 2004 and 2011, there were about 13,000 reports to the FDA’s MedWatch system of psychiatric drugs in which the complaints were about the drugs causing violent side effects, including homicide, mania, and aggressive behavior. At least fourteen school shootings were committed by children on antidepressants, individuals who were taking or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs, resulting in 162 wounded and 72 killed. There have been 22 international drug regulatory warnings issued about psychiatric drugs causing violent behavior they include mania, psychosis, and homicidal thoughts.
Why are we starting children as young as one year of age on these mind-altering drugs?
I’m afraid your right. Follow the money.
What would ever lead a medical professional to think an antidepressant is a good idea for an infant ? What would ever lead an informed parent to think that its a good idea For their child ? How would one know if a one year old is clinically depressed or is just needs a diaper change ? Some pre-teens and teens have received some therapeutic benefit from small, carefully monitored SSRI’s. However, ll I’ m not sure I can as easily connect the dots and make a rational argument linking infant antidepressants to say the Columbine tragedy. In fact, I have a real hard time with the thought that SSRI’s could be given to a baby. That’s what we’re talking about here…a baby. How prevalent is this ? What is your source of information ?
Richard…the light blue areas are links to the information you requested, I always provide the evidence in my articles
And so you did. I would expect nothing less…thank you. Back to my original concerns. What has gone awry in the biomedical community that a physician would ever think this is a good idea ? What kind of insanty would lead a fit parent to ever consider such a thing ? Hmm, fit parent. Wow Jack, maybe you’ve just made a case in favor of eugenics. Sorry.