Argumentative Essay On Medicating Children

Patrick is an active kid, he plays outside, loves talking, but has a hard time staying still in class. Patrick is just a normal boy, if a little bit on the energetic side, but his teacher Ms. Smith does not want to stimulate Patrick the way he should be. She claims that he has severe ADHD and gets him prescribed on buckets of drugs which turns him into a vegetable. This exists in many elementary schools around the nation, and is a horrible truth we cannot escape. Far too many children are being diagnosed with learning disabilities; these “disabilities” are many times diagnosed by school faculty that have no medical background, and the students are put on drugs that make them as brain dead as a zombie to keep them from being rambunctious. Continuing …show more content…
Children may attain an addiction to the drugs they use regardless of if it actually is needed in the first place, incapable of functioning properly when they are unable to use them anymore. In the article Medicating Children: Why Controversy Still Flares over “Early Detection”, the author states that in Wilson’s article, a child who had severe temper-tantrums was diagnosed with antipsychotics when he was eighteen months old and by the time he reached the age of three, his drug schedule had prolonged with a plethora of new medicines, such as Risperdal. The decision of describing Risperdal was made within a few minutes by the pediatrician, as she just glanced at him and believed that he had autism. As the child grew older, the mother comprehended that her son’s character had changed drastically by the drugs’ effects. "All I had was a medicated little boy," she is quoted as saying. "I didn 't have my son. It 's like, you 'd look into his eyes and you would just see just blankness." (psychologytoday.com) After her child was taken off of those medications, his health improved substantially. This is proof that children do not have to take certain medications, because it could affect their health