December 14th, 2009

Huffington Post reports:

This weekend the New York Times reported on a new study, which finds that kids on Medicaid are four times more likely to be prescribed antipsychotic drugs than their privately insured counterparts, and often for conditions for which the drugs are not FDA approved such as A.D.H.D. and conduct disorders. These drugs may not only have significant psychological impacts on the children who take them, but they also cause long-term physical harm. This is terrible no matter what, of course, but let us be very clear about what we are talking about here. In places like New York City, where African-Americans and Latinos are 3.5 times more likely to be on Medicaid than whites, the kids we are talking about are black and brown.

The children who are being systematically over-medicated and denied high quality mental and behavioral health services are disproportionately young people of color. What we are talking about, then, is race even if all but the most oblique reference to it has been scrubbed from the lines of the mainstream media coverage.

Let us also be clear about how this may be happening. The Times piece implies that certain problems with the Medicaid program, such as low reimbursement rates for therapy, contribute to the over-medication of children by creating incentives for doctors to prescribe antipsychotics or by reducing the availability of psychiatrists who accept Medicaid, thus funneling low-income kids to non-specialists who are more likely to provide treatment through drugs. This may very well be true, but let us unpack these dynamics as well from the racial justice tip.

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