It seems the ever-increasing use of psychiatric drugs to treat children may be hitting hardest the troubled youngsters placed foster homes and residential facilities after their parents lose or forfeit custody: Parents and child advocacy groups are accusing many state welfare systems of handing out psychiatric medications too freely to the 500,000 U.S. children in foster care, reports MSNBC. Too often, the overloaded system turns to medication without considering other therapies, they say, citing cases of youngsters returning from foster care on as many as five simultaneous medications and statistics which show as many as one in four foster children in some states is on psychotropic drugs, often without legal consent.
Read more: States wrestle with medicating foster kids