NY Times: In Treating Developmentally Disabled, Potent Drugs and Few Rules

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In Treating Disabled, Potent Drugs and Few RulesBy DANNY HAKIM Patients in state-run homes for the developmentally disabled receive high doses of antipsychotics for behavior control, critics say, and the state is taking steps toward change.Something was happening to Strignano.After she was moved into a state-run group home, the 26-year-old woman, who is severely mentally retarded, started gaining weight, drooling, breaking out in pimples and pulling out her hair, leaving a bald spot the size of a softball on her head.Her mother, Debra Strignano, suspected that someone had increased her daughter’s medication without her family’s consent.When she asked for a copy of a consent form she had once signed for her daughter, she discovered it had been altered, tripling the daily dosage of Clonidine, which is used to control attention deficit disorder. The drug, and four others her daughter was taking, have myriad potential side effects, including rapid weight gain, skin rashes and drowsiness.In response to questions from The New York Times, state officials said they would investigate how the consent form was changed and whether Strignano was receiving the appropriate dose of medication.“Everything with them is, let’s sedate the kid instead of trying to solve the problem,” Ms. Strignano said. “They want to dope her up; they want her to sit there like she doesn’t exist.”Tens of thousands of powerful pills created to treat serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia are given to developmentally disabled people in the care of New York State every day....Psychologists who have worked inside the system describe a culture in which the drugs are used to control the disruptive behavior of the developmentally disabled — people with conditions like autism, Down syndrome and cerebral palsy — an approach increasingly discredited in the field....