Drug Your Child, or Else

The relentless pressure to medicate America's children, and the price a parent pays for refusing

She sat in my office with her hands in her lap and could not stop them from shaking.

I had not asked her anything yet. The fear was already doing its work, in the shallow breathing, in the way her eyes kept drifting to the door, in a voice that would start out steady and then go thin somewhere in the middle of every sentence. She had spent the previous weeks being interrupted and corrected by people in white coats, and her body had already learned what to expect from a room like mine.

Her son was eight years old and could not sit still at school. The school had a recommendation, the pediatrician had a prescription waiting, and she had one question. She wanted to understand what this drug would actually do to a developing brain before she agreed to put it into her child every morning for the next ten years. That strikes me as the most reasonable thing a mother could possibly want to know. In that system it made her a problem.

By the time she found her way to me, she could narrate the choreography of those appointments in detail, because she had been studying it the way prey studies a predator. The professionals on one side of the room and her alone on the other. A clipboard. A pen that paused for half a second whenever she hesitated, so she would understand that the hesitation had been noted. She could feel a file taking shape around her one sentence at a time, and she knew precisely what the file was being built to do.

Nobody threatened her in plain language, because they never have to. The word “neglect” simply wandered into one of the conversations and settled there, soft and deniable, while a nurse asked her in that gentle practiced tone whether she really wanted to put her own beliefs ahead of her son’s wellbeing. Every parent who has ever sat in that chair can hear the thing humming underneath the kindness. Cooperate, or we can take him from you. None of it was a debate. It was closer to a hostage negotiation conducted at room temperature.

She was not against medicine and she was not some conspiracy theorist. She was a mother who wanted to understand one thing before she surrendered her son to a decade of drugs, and for wanting that she had been made to feel she had already done something wrong.

A second set of parents came to me some months later, undone by a different gear of the same machine.

Their daughter was sixteen. She wanted to go to a party at a house where the parents would be away and the alcohol would not, which her mother and father understood perfectly, so they told her no. That is what parents are for. She answered the way a cornered teenager answers when she has run out of other moves, and told them that if they would not let her go, she would kill herself.

Hold on to what these two people actually knew, because everything turns on it. They had been raising this girl for sixteen years. They knew her moods, her bluffs, and the particular theater she staged when she was not getting her way. She was furious, not suicidal, reaching for the one threat left in the house that still had the power to move the adults around her. There was no real danger in that room, only the danger of a clever kid winning an argument she was supposed to lose.

None of that knowledge survived contact with the system.

Once the word is said out loud, something switches on, and the two people who know this child better than anyone alive are quietly relieved of any standing to say so. The emergency room. The evaluation. A protocol with no slot for sixteen years of intimate knowledge and endless room for the opinion of a stranger who met your daughter twenty minutes ago. They were told she would have to be admitted, and when they pushed back they heard the same low hum the first mother heard, the one that says cooperate or this stops being your decision. Three days later she was discharged with a prescription for an SSRI and the reassurance that it was for her protection.

Now look at what that drug actually is. It carries the strongest warning the FDA issues, a black box warning, because in young people it can increase suicidal thinking and behavior. They handed it to a girl who had never once been suicidal, in order to protect her from suicide. The drug has not been studied over the long term, and it is associated with a range of adverse effects, including persistent sexual dysfunction.

I have lost count of how many versions of these parents have sat across from me. The drug is different each time, the diagnosis is different, the child is different, but the hands shake the same way, and the face is always the face of someone who knows something is true and has just been told, very politely, that their knowing carries no weight in this building.

And do not imagine this lives only in my office, with patients I am not free to name. It is in the public record, with names attached.

In 2011 a Detroit mother named Maryanne Godboldo decided to wean her thirteen year old daughter off Risperdal, an antipsychotic she believed was harming the girl. That decision brought Child Protective Services to her door, and behind them a police tactical team with a court order to take the child. The standoff lasted ten hours. They took her daughter anyway. The charges against Godboldo were eventually dropped, but the lesson had already been delivered to every parent watching. Refuse the drug and the state will come for your child.

Or consider Justina Pelletier, whose parents brought her to Boston Children’s Hospital, where doctors decided her physical illness was really psychiatric, recommended stopping the drugs her previous physicians had prescribed, and ordered her into a locked psychiatric ward. When her parents rejected that diagnosis and tried to take her elsewhere, the hospital reported them and the state of Massachusetts seized custody. Justina spent roughly sixteen months as a ward of the state, much of it confined to that ward, until a judge finally sent her home. Her offense, and her parents’ offense, was disagreeing with the diagnosis.

And none of this was ever rare enough to ignore. It happened so often, in so many places, that lawmakers had to write statutes to stop it. Texas passed a law stating in plain language that a parent’s refusal to drug their child is not neglect, and forbidding school employees from threatening to report that refusal to child protective services, because school employees were doing exactly that, using the threat as a tool to force compliance.

In 2004 Congress amended federal law to bar schools from requiring that a child be placed on a stimulant as a condition of attending class. You do not pass a law against something that is not happening.

What Gives Them The Right?

So how did this happen? How did a free people come to ask permission to make decisions about their own bodies and the children who came from them?

Not all at once.

Nobody surrenders their sovereignty in a single afternoon. It went one small deference at a time, each surrender reasonable on its own. Your great-grandparents trusted the family doctor, and mostly he earned it. Then trust hardened into deference, and deference into obligation, and obligation, somewhere along the way, into something close to law.

It did not happen by accident. It was built. Watch the pieces go in.

The corporation moved in first. Medicine had once been a relationship between a patient and a healer, and it was quietly converted into a supply chain. The drug company funds the research, the research becomes the guideline, the guideline becomes the protocol your doctor is bound to follow, and the patient at the end of that chain is no longer a person to be healed but a market to be served. Your treatment was decided in a boardroom long before you walked into the room.

We should be honest about the science these doctors are defending, because it is not the cathedral of certainty they hand you in the exam room.

Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford is one of the most cited medical researchers alive, and he has spent his career studying the quality of medical evidence itself. The title of his most famous paper is not a question. It is a verdict. “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” His work concluded that as much as ninety percent of the published research shaping how you and your children are treated is flawed, misleading, or simply wrong.

Within this corporate capture the doctor was elevated in status and power. Slowly, across a century, the physician was lifted out of the ranks of ordinary fallible men and dressed as a demigod. The white coat became a vestment. The title became a halo. We were taught to lower our voices in his presence, to apologize for our questions, to treat a disagreement with him as something close to blasphemy. A man who is merely well trained became a man you are not permitted to doubt.

Then the media built the temple around him. Turn on any broadcast and watch the ritual. No event can be understood and no fact can be believed until an expert is wheeled out to bless it. For more on this we turn to Doctor So and So of Such and Such University. The anchor nods. The credential speaks. The audience receives. Night after night, beneath the content of any single story, the same lesson is hammered in. You are not equipped to know anything on your own. Wait for the expert. Defer to the credential.

Then came the public health authorities, and the mask came all the way off. Here was the priesthood with the full power of the state behind it, telling you which businesses could open and which had to close, who could bury their dead and who could not, what you were permitted to say and what would get you erased. And when anyone asked the obvious questions, they were not answered. They were attacked. A commandment was issued in place of an argument. Trust the Science. Not examine it, not question it, not test it against your own eyes, which is the only thing science has ever actually been.

Trust it.

Worship it.

Obey it.

The one human enterprise built entirely on doubt was turned into a doctrine you were forbidden to doubt.

The expert who once advised you became the authority who instructs you, and the authority who instructs you became the power that can overrule you. You were never conquered. You were conditioned, gently, across generations, until the most basic rights a human being has came to feel like privileges the institution lends you and can revoke.

But they were never privileges. Your body is your own. Your children are your own, not wards of the state out on loan to you for as long as you stay compliant. The authority to decide for them was never granted by a license or a guideline or a public health directive. It is older than all of them.

Call it natural, call it God given, call it whatever your conscience calls it, but understand that it did not come from them, and it is not theirs to take back. And yet look at where we stand. Parents now sit in examination rooms genuinely afraid to say the word no. Afraid a question will be entered in a chart. Afraid that hesitation itself will be read as a confession. A people who have become afraid to refuse have already been governed, long before anyone writes a law.

And this was never only about psychiatry. Ask the mother who dared to raise an honest question about a vaccine, about the schedule, the ingredients, the studies, and watch what the culture does to her. For decades now such parents have been shamed, ridiculed, dismissed as ignorant and an anti-vax conspiracy nut, never answered and always attacked. The topic was never the point. The lesson was, and it is the same lesson every parent in my office is taught. Do not ask. Do not question. Hand the child over and be grateful. The subject changes. The command behind it never does.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

To the mother with the shaking hands. To the father who knew his own daughter better than any stranger with a lanyard ever could. To every one of you who has sat in that chair feeling small while a person in a coat decided the fate of your child in front of you. I want to give you the one thing the entire apparatus is built to keep out of your hands.

The emperor has no clothes.

The authority looming over you in that room is not made of stone. It is made of your belief in it. The credential commands you only for as long as you agree to be commanded. The standard of care rules your family only because a room full of frightened people keeps agreeing to pretend it is holy. And it takes exactly one person, standing in plain daylight, willing to say the obvious thing out loud. He is naked. The protocol is not God. You were never required to kneel.

So stop kneeling.

When they threaten you, let them. Make them follow through. Let them put it in writing. Let them call Child Protective Services and let them try to explain to a judge why a mother asking what a drug will do to her child’s brain is a danger to that child. The threat was always the whole of their power. And a threat only works on a person still hoping to be spared. Stop hoping to be spared, and the threat turns to air in their hands.

They called you difficult. Noncompliant. Anti-science. Paranoid. Good. Take the names. Wear them. Become every single one of them, because in a system this captured those words have stopped meaning what is wrong with you and started meaning what is still alive in you. The ones they cannot frighten are the only ones still free.

And be clear about what you are actually fighting for, because this was never about one prescription. You are fighting for sovereignty. For informed consent, the real kind, where they hand you every risk and every alternative and every inconvenient thing they would rather you never read, and then the decision is yours.

Not theirs. Yours.

You are fighting for medical freedom, that radical and ancient idea that your body and your children belong to you and not to an institution in a coat.

So let me put the order of things back the way they spent your whole life inverting it. They serve you.

You do not serve them.

You are not a patient waiting for permission. You are the one with the authority in that room, the one who weighs the risks and makes the call, and their entire job is to carry the truth to you and then live with whatever you decide. They hold no authority over your body, your conscience, or your child that you did not personally hand them. And anything you handed over, you are allowed to take back. Today. At the next appointment. With a level voice and both feet planted on the floor.

That mother did not need my permission to know what she already knew. She needed one person to tell her that her knowing was real. So I told her. And now I am telling you.

Examine the evidence.

Trust what you experience.

And question the authorities. Every single time. Until they remember they were only ever meant to serve you.

AWAKEN

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I try to keep RADICALLY GENUINE as free as I can, but it takes quite a lot of work. If you find some value in my writing and podcast I very much appreciate the paid subscription. It really helps me continue putting time aside for these pieces. Thank you.