Huge doses of potent antipsychotics flow into state jails for troubled kids

[Jan Klimkowski]

"This is a very important issue," said Broward County Public Defender Howard Fink elstein, whose office represents children in juvenile court. "If kids are being given these drugs without proper diagnosis, and it is being used as a 'chemical restraint,' I would characterize it as a crime. A battery - a battery of the brain each and every time it is given."

In some cases, the drugs are prescribed by contract doctors who have taken huge speaker fees and other gifts from makers of antipsychotic pills, companies that reap staggering profits selling medications, The Post found.

(snip)

A look at the sheer numbers of drugs purchased, though, suggests a startling story is unfolding in state homes for wayward kids.

In 2007, for example, DJJ bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen. Overall, in 24 months, the department bought 326,081 tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for use in state-operated jails and homes for children.

That's enough to hand out 446 pills a day, seven days a week, for two years in a row, to kids in jails and programs that can hold no more than 2,300 boys and girls on a given day.

(snip)

Instead, David "was subjected to a chemical control regimen" intended not to help him, but to "chemically restrain him," the lawsuit said.

The case, originally brought against DJJ, the home's private operator, a health care provider and staff members, was settled in April for an undisclosed amount.

Settled out of court. And so the abuse continues.

A personal recollection, if you will.

My Polish grandmother was an incredibly strong-willed woman. When her 70-year-old father (who had dementia) and 7-year-old son were ethnically cleansed by the NKVD from near Lwow, Poland, in 1939, she voluntarily joined the train of cattle trucks heading for Siberia to be with, and attempt to protect, her family.

Her father and Halina, her infant granddaughter, died in Siberia, but she fought her way out with her son (my father) and 20-year-old daughter. During the escape, she killed a Red Army soldier - according to my family's mythology.

(It may be true, in fact I suspect it probably is - but there is no proof. Regardless, those of my family who survived Siberia did so because of my grandmother's indomitable will.)

Through a variety of impossible journeys, most members of the Polish side of my family who did not die in WW2 ended up in England in 1947, where my grandmother resumed her role as slav matriarch - ruling the reunited family from a home in London, overlooking Finsbury Park.

However, as my grandmother grew older, her behaviour became increasingly erratic and unpredictable. There was some dementia, some PTSD, and perhaps other undiagnosed conditions.

She had never learnt English, and became paranoid that anyone who didn't speak Polish was a member of the NKVD or Red Army seeking to arrest her childen and grandchildren and take them away. Since the NKVD had stolen a 7-year-old and a 70-year-old from the family home in the middle of night, classifying the duo as members of the intelligentsia and thus threats to the Soviet Union, her paranoia was at least rooted in genuine events.

Then, in an incident which split my family for a decade and more, my aunt committed my grandmother to a lunatic asylum. In fairness to my aunt, I suspect she was unaware of the consequences - the most fundamental of which was that my grandmother could henceforth only be released back to the care of her family on the authority of a psychiatrist.

My grandmother was now locked, firmly, behind the stone walls of Bedlam.

And so began the chemical constraints and physical abuse of the lunatic asylum. My grandmother was thorazin-ed into zombiesque placidity. If a flash of her true character broke through the chemical haze, asylum staff would lock her in a physical straitjacket.

My father bore the worst of this, unable to rescue his mother and bring her back to the care of her loving family.

I remember rare visits to the asylum as a child - the clanking thud of the security doors, the rattle of keys, the shuffling of feet along endless dank corridors, a chemical odour that permeated clothes, the stench of urine, the glassy stares.

My father giving my grandmother cigarettes which she immediately hid, furtively, in her asylum clothes.

A moment of tenderness as my grandmother seemed to recognize her grandson through the thorazine fog and then gone again.

The asylum motto should have been: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Fundamentally, lunatic asylums were about containment.

There was only the slightest pretense of therapy or treatment.

Unless some shrink wanted to test a new drug on his captive human population - for his drug company or spook masters.

It would be good to be able to end this personal recollection by declaring that a brave new world has arrived.

But such a claim seems impossible.

The abuses continue, and the asylums that remain (commonly hiding behind some fancy new name such as "secure unit") are now often private for profit institutions.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.