Friday, August 3, 2007

Kid has a problem? Put 'em on drugs

The number of Florida children taking powerful anti-psychotic drugs has increased about 250 percent in the last seven years, despite concerns about the long-term affects on children and the cost to state taxpayers, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Doctors are increasingly using drugs called "atypicals" to control aggressive children and calm kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, the St. Petersburg Times reported.

In Florida, more than 18,000 children on Medicaid were given anti-psychotic drugs last year, including 1,100 under the age of 6. The drug can be used on kids under 6 only in extreme cases.

READ MORE @ ST PETERSBURG TIMES

Ashes of 2 Oregon mental-hospital patients laid to rest after six decades

For more than six decades, the cremated remains of brothers Robin and Wade Graham were stored in anonymous little copper canisters on shelves of the crumbling Oregon psychiatric hospital made famous as the movie set of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

The Grahams were finally buried next to their parents in Grangeville's Prairie View Cemetery, after a service Sunday attended by more than 20 family members — some of whom never knew the two existed — after their years in exile at the former Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Ore.

The weekend burial in this north-central Idaho town comes after Oregon lawmakers in April passed a law making it easier for families of patients who lived out their lives at the mental hospital to reclaim their ashes. The unclaimed bodies of 3,600 mental patients were cremated and the remains put in copper canisters from the early 1900s to the 1970s.

READ MORE @ Associated Press
LEARN MORE @ Mental Health Association of Portland