"We need to stop the belief that a pill will always cure everything"

Psychiatrist-blogger Maria over at intueri writes on the tragic Rebecca Riley case:

. . . no one is jumping up to conduct a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded study on kids and medications because of all the ethical issues involved (although I recall reading somewhere that Harvard had done something like that”¦ though I can’t find the citation now). Would you want your kid (baby sister/brother/cousin/et al.) to receive medications at uncertain doses with uncertain effects with uncertain outcomes? Do we even know how quetiapine or valproic acid or whatever affects neuronal (read: brain) development? Particularly at the age of TWO? Or, heck, even FOUR? The brain is a miraculous organ that changes dramatically well through adolescence. Just what are we doing to the neurochemistry of the brain through the introduction of these substances?

We don’t even know how valproic acid works in the treatment of bipolar disorder in adults.

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