When military families divided as a result of deployment, young kids are often left holding the emotional bag. To fill the mom- or dad-shaped hole, Army Times reports that more military families than ever are resorting to psychiatric drugs like Clonidine for their kids – because for some reason, big feelings are to be feared. This can mirror the number of active-duty servicemen and women who are on psychiatric meds. With so lots of people using psychiatric the costs of the prescription are sure to rise leaving many to seek out personal loans to obtain them.
Johnny will feel better with Clonidine
Clonidine is an agent that will decrease the heart rate and relax the blood vessels, the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Some psychiatrists prescribe Clonidine to treat such conditions as ADHD, anxiety and autism, although many others oppose the drug because of potential side effects like excess sedation and irritability.
Regardless of where medical professionals fall on the debate, it is indisputable that psychiatric medication prescriptions for military children have gone way up. Over 300,000 prescriptions were given to military children for psychiatric drugs in 2009, reports the Army Times. Since 2005, the under 18 military family population only went up by 1 percent while in 2005, the figure was 18 percent less. With antipsychotics, there has been a 50 percent increase in the number prescribed. A 40 percent increase has been shown in anti-anxiety drugs like Clonidine though.
Active duty forces have shown there to be an increase in the amount of psychiatric medications. Just since the Afghanistan war started, that number increase 76 percent.
All about the deployment and re-integration soldiers go through
Structure is something children need according to most psychologists. Often, these military children have to deal with mom or dad being deployed and then trying to re-integrate causing a lot of stress for the children. A University of California, Los Angeles psychiatrist, Patricia Lester, explained this.
These cycles repeat over the course of a parent’s military career, an assertion that is borne out in mental health studies conducted such as the one conducted by the Rand Corp. Military children with parents who went away on longer, more frequent deployments performed significantly worse in school and required nearly 20 percent more pediatric outpatient visits. Then there would be more drugs prescribed. Clonidine and anti-psychotics would be prescribed more often.
Military families may be having a harder time managing than many believe while the growing psychiatric prescriptions for children is something many psychiatrists talking to the Army Times showed concern over.
Citations
armytimes.com/news/2011/01/military-children-taking-more-psychiatric-drugs-010211w/
National Center for Biotechnology Information
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0000623
The Clonidine (and other meds) Song
youtube.com/watch?v=U6aI05-E9uI
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