Lawsuit Exposes State in Taking Kids from Parents and Heavily Drugging them with Psychotropics

By Claire Bernish

Foster children in Missouri have been dangerously over-medicated with antipsychotic drugs — intended to treat conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia — to manage behavioral disorders like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a new civil rights lawsuit, which instead effectively puts them in “a chemical straightjacket.”

“The sedative properties of the drugs are employed to sedate and control the difficult behaviors of children,” says attorney Bill Grimm of the National Center for Youth Law, which — together with the Saint Louis University School of Law Legal Clinic and the legal advocacy group Children’s Rights — brought the lawsuit June 12.

“Whenever a state takes a child into custody, there are certain obligation that arise to that child from the state,” such as the government’s duty to protect children’s health and safety, the attorney asserts.

Missouri’s Children’s Division, “has failed to meet its critical obligations and presently subjects [foster children represented] to physical and psychological harm and the unreasonable risk of such harm in violation of their federal constitutional and statutory rights,” the class-action suit contends.

Grimm laments the issue compounding due to flimsy recordkeeping, adding, according to Reason, “The caregivers don’t know in some instances what the medications are, what conditions they’re supposed to address for the child, what benefits they are supposed to provide to the child … They are operating in the dark.”

Over-medicating could induce children into being pliable and compliant, but the effects of providing youth with medicine intended to treat serious conditions — for behaviors not deemed as grave — can have deleterious effects on their health.

Foster children arriving in custodial care for the first time have been documented bringing prescriptions in paper bags or wrapped in tissue paper, according to the suit, minus crucial information on dosages and side effects — leaving foster parents in the dark about how to properly medicate children.