Foster kids need more than meds
There’s little doubt that many children who come to Colorado’s foster care systemhave lived through horrors that few of us can imagine and behave in ways that are hard to handle.
But that’s no excuse for pumping so many of them full of psychotropic drugs instead of dealing with their problems.
A series of stories in The Denver Post last week detailed how more than a quarter of Colorado’s 16,800 foster children were prescribed such drugs in 2012.
The prescribing of these drugs to foster kids is occurring at a troubling rate. Colorado foster children are given antipsychotics at a rate 12 times that of other kids on Medicaid.
The stories, by Post reporters Jennifer Brown and Christopher N. Osher, also described how Colorado lags other states in establishing policies to cut down on the use of psychotropic drugs by foster children.
The state needs to get a handle on this situation. That starts with actually tracking which foster kids get these drugs and how much.
Colorado is among a minority of states that doesn’t compile such metrics.
A task force has been established in Colorado to talk about ways to track prescrip- tion practices when it comes to foster kids, but such a policy is not yet up and running.
Other states have review processes that include the installation of a gatekeeper to review the prescribing of these drugs to foster children.
Some also require legal guardians, adoptive parents or biological parents to sign off on the administration of such drugs first.
Keep in mind these are powerful drugs with serious side effects.
As The Post reported, about half of the children on government insurance who get some of the strongest drugs, antipsychotics, do not have a psychotic illness listed in theirMedicaid claims.
The presumption is that they are being prescribed this medication for “off label” reasons, including behavior stemming from the traumatic lives they led prior to being placed in foster care.
Many of these children have indeed been scarred by what they’ve endured, but the answer cannot be their wholesale drugging that leaves them akin to zombies, unable to come to terms with their experiences.
There is no easy answer, but it’s essential to help kids find a path to normalcy before they “age out” of the system and are on their own. Colorado can do better than that.