Drugging Our Kids for Peace of Mind...Dare We Say No?

Search the Scriptures Daily Program #4205b Transcript follows: Gary: This is Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call.  Still to come, answers to your questions in Contending for the Faith and in Understanding the Scriptures, Dave and Tom will resume their discussion of God’s Salvation. It’s on the horizon, it’s almost in view, get ready for Judgment Day, Islam, Israel and the Nations, the new book from Dave Hunt and The Berean Call.  Is God about to judge the world over issues related to Israel?  This highly informative and revealing work cuts through the political to the prophetic, alerting us to the judgment about to befall this planet.  Hans Kristian, President of the International Sakharov Committee, calls it “the most important book on the issues of the Middle East and the Holy Land.”  Joseph Farah, Founder of WorldNetDaily.Com says,  “Dave Hunt has nailed it.  This book is a wake up call to a sleep-walking world trying to make sense of events that were foretold in the greatest book ever written, the Bible.”  Lecturer and co-author of The Seduction of Christianity, Dave Hunt: “Judgment Day is the most important book I’ve written.  God’s judgment is coming upon this world.  The leaders of this world are defying what God has said about Israel and about that land that belongs to them.  And they are taking the side of people who pretend that that land belongs to them, and it does not, and God is going to punish this world, and we document that in the book.”              This treatment of the topic offers no room for political correctness or ecumenical accommodations.  The truth is more devastating than fiction.  Judgment Day, Islam, Israel and the Nations, the latest by Dave Hunt is now available from The Berean Call in e-book and hard cover.  Information on how to order in just a moment.  In addition to this radio program we publish a monthly newsletter which we make available free of charge.  We also produce and distribute a wide variety of teaching materials including books, video and audio tapes and other items to encourage the serious study of God’s Word.  For a complete list of materials or to get a copy of today’s broadcast, write to us PO Box 7019, Bend, Oregon 97708.  Call our toll free order number 877-882-4253, that’s 877-88Bible, or visit our website at www.thebereancall.org.  If you would like a copy of this broadcast, ask for Program #4205, and be sure to mention the call letters of this station.  We’ll repeat this information at the end of the program. RELIGION IN THE NEWS             Now, Religion in the News, a report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media.  This week’s item is excerpted from Insight Magazine.  The numbers are alarming.  The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that as many as 1.5 million children and adolescents, 2.5 percent of all Americans under age 18, are seriously depressed.  The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, puts the number of significantly depressed children and adolescents at 3.4 million.  More startling still, the number of children ages 5 and younger, taking the most commonly prescribed anti-depressants, increased from 8,000 to 40,000, in one year, according to IMS Health, a pharmaceutical research firm in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania.  During that same 12-month period, from 1996 to 1997, the total number of youngsters 17 and younger, who were prescribed Prozac or its primary competitors, Zoloft and Paxil, rose by more than 120 thousand to 792 thousand.  It’s no longer rare for doctors to prescribe those drugs for children as young as four, says Donald L. Rosenblitz, medical director of the Lucy Daniels Center for early childhood, a therapeutic nursery in Cary, North Carolina   “They are doing it more and more, probably more often than I am comfortable with,” Rosenblitz  says.  “There is no information yet on the long term affects of these drugs on the developing brain,” he adds.  The enormous weight of evidence so far is that anti-depressants do not help childhood depression. T. A. McMahon:             Wow, this is really a scary article, Martin, Deidre, don’t you agree? Martin:             Yeah, it’s a frightening article and what we see here is, over the years, we have gone to a medicalizing of problems of living and the medicalization of these problems.  There are biological problems in life whether it has to do with the body or the brain, but what’s happened is, the medicalization of these problems has spread prolifically as more and more and more subtle drugs (subtle drugs are those that don’t have as many side effects) have come along.  It’s not only been a medicalization of our problems but the use of drugs to deal with these problems that have been medicalized and then it’s not only going to the general population but it’s being pushed downward as young as possible and these types of drugs are not even, in certain cases the manufacturer of the drug admits that it shouldn’t be used for children.  The tests haven’t been done on children and so therefore, it’s not prescribed for children.  But the doctors themselves have the ability to take the, off the label so to speak, and go ahead and prescribe it for almost anybody they want and so they are prescribing it for younger and younger and younger children and so what we are doing is we’re drugging more prolifically than we ever have, younger children and younger than we ever have.  And so, we’re medicalizing the problem, we’re proliferating it throughout the entire population, we’re pushing it downward to the youngest possible and most potentially affected by long term results that we know nothing about. T. A. McMahon:             Martin, now some people who complain that we are even addressing something like this would say, Well, you guys are really way out of your field here, this is a scientific medical problem, this has to do with brain chemistry and it’s science which you can’t speak to.  But Martin, isn’t it true that the diagnosis of this depression comes through an interview, not through any kind of medical testing? Martin:             Yes.  What happens is, I always give this example, if you give a hundred patients to a doctor and purge from their records anything verbal that they said and tell the doctor you can do any kind of biological examination of them but you can’t talk to them, now select those individuals that are bi-polar depression or just straight depression or whatever and the doctor will tell you right away, I can’t, I have to talk to the patient in order to find out.  And so, it’s a matter that the doctors have to receive verbal information about the state that the person is in rather than biological markers as to what the state is of the person. T. A. McMahon:             So, let’s say a three-year-old or a four-year-old child sits in the corner sucking his thumb, he doesn’t want any part of what his mom or dad tell him to do, this could be a candidate for Prozac or something like that, correct? Deidre:             Yes, and it doesn’t take much of the behavior of a child being unhappy for parents to become alarmed and we kind of live in a world now where if people are unhappy or sad they are going to be considered needing some kind of medical help, psychological help, but you know there are a lot of things in our society that are different now and it isn’t that psychology is going to help and it isn’t that all of these brain chemicals are going to help.  But when you think of the amount of time that children spend watching television; when you think of the amount of time that children are with their parents; you have a huge amount of time with television and with more and more parents working you have less and less hours of quiet just simple normal activity.  It used to be, we used to play with things and do things that would be boring to a child these days. T. A. McMahon:             Right, because of the, well basically, it’s passive viewing but the things that they are viewing move along at such an incredible rate of activity it’s a strange phenomena. Deidre:             Yes, and the things that children must be absorbing from the television, so much of it being not true, not really related to their own life and then they apply that to their life, I think it would be better to turn off the television than to recommend any kind of drugs. Martin:             Back to your question about, can we make comments about these bio-chemical things; if that’s not our field.  People can read the results of research and I think most people know that the doctors main line of information is actually the pharmaceutical company representative not something he has researched himself.  So, they are taking the word of the pharmaceutical representative based upon the studies the pharmaceuticals have done and they are huge corporations with lots of money and what’s happening is we’re, again, drugging too many at too young an age and it’s a consequence that we may have to reap in the future because, unfortunately, of the long term affects of these drugs that we know very little about.