Teen Prescription Drugs!!! Opinions?

Question by ggfhg: Teen Prescription Drugs!!! opinions?
Please leave opinions and thoughts of prescription drugs. Is it really helping or hurting teens with ADHD,ADD,Anxiety ,depression, bi-polar, manic depression…ect.

Abuse of prescription drugs (addiction)
Responsibility(DR. vs. PARENT)
Advertisement of teen prescription drugs
Business…pharmaceutical company influence

Best answer:

Answer by With her head in the clouds
In some situations certain drugs are needed to alleviate symptoms but I think with psychiatric disorders it is best to try to help them handle it as well as possible using other interventions. Teaching them coping strategies and psychological therapies like counselling. That way the dose is less and therefore the sufferers rely on it less.

Abuse of prescription pills: I think this is definitely a real problem. However, if other interventions are used as treatment and less pills are prescribed then the rate of addictions and crime caused by addicts (to get their fix) should decrease as ideally less sufferers of these disorders will be medicated. If you’re not on the medication in the first place you can’t get addicted to it. Ie: Depressed person gets put on Prozac – develops reliance on Prozac – becomes addicted – begins stealing etc to get next fix now if you take out the first element of the equation which is the initial prescribing of Prozac then the other elements of the equation cannot exist.

Responsibility (Dr vs parent): I’m not entirely sure what you mean by this do you mean is the doctor or parent more responsible for the teen’s drugs? I’m going to interpret it as that so hopefully I’m reading right. I think both have an equal bearing of responsibility in regards to the teenager’s medications. The only variable is that they are responsible in different ways. The doctor who has done years in university and has anatomical knowledge of the medicine involved in the prescribing of the medications is responsible for dosing correctly. However, the doctor isn’t always there to ensure that the teen is using their meds properly so especially if it is a younger teen it’s the responsibility of the parent (at least until the teenager can do it themselves) to ensure they are using the medication properly and to educate themselves on signs that something more is amiss so they can get additional help or a change in medications or doses if it appears that the current method is not having the positive affect desired. Additionally though much of the responsibility goes to the teen. They are not children anymore and if this is a condition that will likely affect them for life (ie Bipolar) they need to learn how to effectively handle it. A parent can help and ensure everything runs smoothly and doctors can help adjust meds but at the end of the day the teen needs to learn and understand how they need to treat this condition and often why this needs to be done (as some teens may be reluctant as having this condition may make them “different”).

Advertisements ofr teen prescription drugs: I’m not sure where you’re from (my guesses are the US as the majority of people on here are) but I’m from Australia and here we don’t randomly advertise prescription drugs (with the exception of oral contraceptives of course but even that’s not everywhere). I think it’s important to advertise contraceptives so teens are aware of them (and to visit your doctor to have them prescribed but others I don’t think are necessary. The disorders you have listed are prevalent in societies:
10% of people in the US are medicated for depression
2.6% of American have Bipolar (can’t find stats for how many take medications but I’d say quite a lot presumably).

I’m not sure about the stats for others but with that being said it seems that although the stats don’t seem huge we should put it into perspective. If America has a population of roughly 300 million people. 10% of that is 30 million and 2.6 is about 7.8 million altogether that’s 37.8 million people being medicated and often with massive doses and may, if they used other interventions properly would not need it at all. Those numbers are only for 2 of the disorders. Imagine what it would be altogether! With all this being said it’s clear that there is no shortage of knowledge about these medications and therefore extra advertisements are not needed not warranted.

Business Pharmaceutical Companies: All I can say about this is that a pharmaceutical company is a company like any other and are designed to make money. It’s just that their profit comes from the manufacturing and selling of medications. The company (unless it has a horrible reputation) should have no bearing on how, why or when a person takes a medication for a health condition. And if a person chooses whether to take their medication and listen to their health advisor based on the name of the company that makes the pills then I’m sorry but they are a vain and weak-minded individual.

Oh and by the way manic depression is just another name for Bipolar so in essence the two are the one and same disorder.

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