Clonidine and military kids - Good or bad?

When military families split due to deployment, young kids are regularly left holding the emotional bag. As outlined by Army Times, this meltdown of the family unit has caused the number of psychiatric drugs like Clonidine prescribed by doctors to kids each year to skyrocket. This can mirror the number of active-duty servicemen and women who are on psychiatric meds. With so lots of people using psychiatric the costs of the prescription are sure to rise leaving numerous to seek out payday loans to obtain them. Post resource – Clonidine and the roller coaster of psychiatric meds for kids by MoneyBlogNewz.

Prescribing Clonidine for this

Clonidine is an agent that will decrease the heart rate and relax the blood vessels, the National Center for Biotechnology Information. ADHD, autism and anxiety are all treated with Clonidine often. Unfortunately, the side effects of sedation and irritability aren't worth it for many.

It doesn't matter what you believe in the debate. The fact that military children are being prescribed the drug much more often is still there. According to the Army Times, there have been a ton of psychiatric drugs given to military children. In fact, in 2009, there were 300,000 given alone. That figure is 18 percent higher than it was in 2005, and the under-18 military family population increased by less than 1 percent over that span. With antipsychotics, there has been a 50 percent increase in the number prescribed. A 40 percent increase has been shown in anti-anxiety drugs like Clonidine though.

Active duty forces have shown there to be an increase in the amount of psychiatric medications. Just since the Afghanistan war started, that number increase 76 percent.

Employment and re-integration being shown here

Structure is something children need according to most psychologists. Dr. Patricia Lester who is a University of California, Los Angeles psychiatrist explains that military children get really stressed with mom or dad getting deployed and them coming back for re-integration.

These cycles repeat over the course of a parent’s military career, an assertion that is borne out in mental health studies conducted such as the one conducted by the Rand Corp. The studied talked about children who had parents that left on more frequent, longer deployments. These children usually needed 20 percent more pediatric outpatient visits while also performing worse in school. This is turn leads to increased prescriptions of drugs like Clonidine and various anti-psychotics.

Psychiatrists who spoke with Army Times expressed concern over the growing trend of psychiatric prescriptions for children, and the increase among military children suggests that perhaps military families are having a difficult time managing.

Citations

armytimes.com/news/2011/01/military-children-taking-more-psychiatric-drugs-010211w/

National Center for Biotechnology Information

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0000623

The Clonidine (and other meds) Song

youtube.com/watch?v=U6aI05-E9uI