Medicating Aliah

Medicating Aliah:
When she was transferred from Austin State Hospital to a residential facility on March 18, 2004, Aliah was on five different medications, putting her on the extreme end of a growing practice known as polypharmacy that worries many doctors. “This is a complicated regimen using powerful psychotropic medications in a barely adolescent girl, so I would be quite concerned about it,” says Dr. Joseph Woolston, a Yale University professor and chief of child psychiatry at Yale-New Haven Hospital. “It isn’t grossly, acutely dangerous, but it is sedating and would make it difficult for a child to experience the world in a normal way. If you or I were on that regimen we would have a lot of trouble attending to work or school. We don’t have any idea what that combination of medications does to a developing child. It may have a number of long-term side effects.” He also suspects that the drugs may have been used as much to control the angry reactions of a girl who was hospitalized against her will as to treat any mental and emotional problems.

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this is a sad story of medicalization going too far into schools and drug treatments going too far in arresting a teenagers natural life of the mind.