Bills target giving foster kids too many drugs

Youths testify about the effects of psychiatricmeds

SACRAMENTO — Following powerful testimony by former foster youth, a package of reform bills designed to rein in the excessive use of psychiatric drugs in California’s child welfare system met unanimous approval in the state Senate on Tuesday — the first step in a series of legislative moves ahead.

The foster youth told the Senate’s Human Services Committee they’d been kicked out of residential treatment programs for refusing drugs that caused them debilitating side effects, had been prescribed four and five medications at once, and often suffered in silence when no one was there to listen.

Former foster youth Michael Place told senators he was misdiagnosed and “coerced” into taking drugs that caused the slight teen to suffer excessive drowsiness and grow to 250 pounds. “I wasn’t bipolar,” said Place, now a psychology graduate student and youth advocate. “I was an 11- year- old emotionally traumatized child.”

Joined by public health nurses, social workers, advocates, county leaders and welfare directors, the former foster youth urged support for four bills that would improve court oversight of prescribing, better track medication use and call for non- drug therapies before medication. The legislation — authored by Sens. Jim Beall, D- San Jose; Holly Mitchell, D- Los Angeles, and Bill Monning, D- Carmel — comes after a yearlong investigation by this newspaper called “Drugging Our Kids.”

The bills passed unanimously out of the Human Services Committee on Tuesday and now head to other policy and budget committees next week. DeAngelo Cortijo , a Chabot College student and juvenile justice intern with the National Center for Youth Law, acknowledged he had “trust, anger and love issues” after first entering foster care at age 2. But treated by five psychiatrists in foster care and prescribed combinations of antipsychotics, antidepressants and stimulants simply intensified his “pain, hurt and confusion,” he said. “Working with horses and living in a clean, safe environment did more for me than any drug,” he told senators Tuesday.

The chairman of the Human Services Committee, Sen. Mike McGuire, D- Healdsburg, insisted Tuesday the four bills were only the beginning. His committee will soon hold a hearing on the pharmaceutical industry’s role in the excessive prescribing to foster youth. California has to stop “drugging our kids,” McGuire said. “We have to take the tens of millions of dollars we are spending on psychotropic medications and put it into trauma care.”