They start using drugs as early as 6 years old.

They Are Using Drugs Starting at Age 6

It’s Normal

“99% of Spanish children diagnosed and treated with amphetamines (rubifen, ritalin, concerta) for attention deficit with hyperactivity (ADHD) are not actually sick, but have been victims of an ‘overdiagnosis’ committed by society: the psychiatrists who treated them and their own parents, who demand the ‘magic pill’ to eliminate the troubles that children can cause.”

This is how a news report from the Europa Press Agency begins, quoting psychiatrist Eglée Iciarte, a doctor at the Autonomous University of Madrid. This professional speaks of the “trivialization of diagnoses” made by many professionals in this specialty for “treating a symptom at the level of disease.”

What Is the Mistake

“This mistake is the result of an excess of diagnosis, the ‘medicalization’ of life, and an attempt to respond to the demands of the parents themselves, who ask for the magic pill to solve the problems they have with their children,” according to the expert, who recalled that Spain is the third country in the world, only behind the United States and Canada, in administering psychotropic drugs to minors.
What is the consequence? According to this psychiatrist, children and young people being treated with psychotropic drugs before their personality and nervous system are fully formed may suffer from anything from diabetes to growth difficulties. Furthermore, these hasty diagnoses can turn them into drug addicts in the future or cause them real psychological problems.

The Europa Press statement cites remarks that we will work from here. The spokesperson for the European Humanist Regional, Giorgio Schultze, denounces that in Italy, pharmaceutical companies like Lilly, the manufacturer of Prozac, are “conducting psychological tests in schools where more than 50% of children are being diagnosed with hyperactivity.”

“This is exaggerated and we are concerned that many minors are being treated with psychotropic drugs unnecessarily because parents are afraid their children will be expelled from school,” says Schultze.
Published by Miguel Jara on October 28, 2010