Pubdate: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 Source: Orange County Register (CA) Copyright: 2000 The Orange County Register Contact: P.O. Box 11626, Santa Ana, CA 92711 Fax: (714) 565-3657 Website: http://www.ocregister.com/ HILLARY AWAKENS TO CHILD DRUG DANGERS It's not that Hillary Clinton was out of line when she raised concerns Monday at the White House about the increasing use of psychotropic drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac by children as young as two years old. That concern is certainly warranted. It's just that it's a little surprising coming from Mrs. Clinton. It was only last June, after all, that Mrs. Clinton, along with Vice President Al Gore's wife Tipper, hosted a highly publicized conference on mental health. That conference, as Sally Zinman, director of the California Network of Mental Health Clients, put it, seemed like "an infomercial for drugs. There was absolutely no mention of the potential risks." At the June 1999 conference Mrs. Clinton introduced Dr. Harold Koplewicz of New York University's Child Studies Center and stood by beaming as he traced all mental and emotional problems to brain biochemistry. Dr. Koplewicz derided explanations like "inadequate parenting and bad childhood traumas" as an "antiquated way of thinking" about depression and other childhood problems. He blamed school violence on untreated mental problems and suggested that if anything too few young children were being treated with psychiatric drugs. Better living through chemistry. Nobody at the conference was so impolite as to point out that three of the recent school shooters had been treated with psychiatric drugs. Peter R. Breggin, M.D., a psychiatrist and author in Bethesda, Md., told us this week that he thinks Mrs. Clinton's remarkable turnaround was little more than "saving face, covering her tracks and engaging in political damage control." Dr. Breggin (www.breggin.com), author of "Talking Back to Prozac," "Talking Back to Ritalin" and the just-released "Reclaiming Our Children," is a long-time critic of the use of powerful psychotropic drugs on children. He believes that a recent study and editorial in JAMA, the American Medical Association journal, showing that use of psychotropic drugs by children aged two to four had tripled was the factor that had gotten Mrs. Clinton's attention. Dr. Joseph T. Coyle of the Harvard Medical School wrote in JAMA: "Given that there is no empirical evidence to support psychotropic drug treatment in very young children and that there are valid concerns that such treatment could have deleterious effects on the developing brain, the reasons for these troubling changes in practice need to be identified." One of the reasons, of course, is that the government and many school systems have been cheer-leaders for using behavior-altering drugs on children. Dr. Breggin argues, for example, that Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder is far from a scientifically established biological disorder at all, but, as he put it to us Tuesday, "a list of behaviors that teachers would like to expunge from their classrooms, like talking out of turn and not sitting still. These stimulant drugs crush the vitality and the libertarian spirit of young children and that is why they are popular. But we know enough from animal research and clinical studies to be confident that it is scientifically unsound to experiment with psychoactive agents on small children." He notes that Mrs. Clinton did not criticize the widespread medicating of school-age children, but expressed concern only about medicating the very young. Mrs. Clinton, for whatever reason, has identified and publicized a phenomenon that deserves attention and concern as the finer distinctions are made regarding in what circumstances and at what age these types of drugs might have some use. But she hasn't come close to getting to the bottom of the matter - or even urging action that would begin the process. Posted By Allan Wilkinson