http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2007/11/10/forced-medication-could-your-child-be-next.aspx

State mandated drugging of children as young as three years old is a disturbing yet growing trend. Here Gregory Hession, J.D., recounts one of his cases where he tried, in vain, to uphold a heartbroken mother's wishes not to drug her six-year-old mildly autistic son, who had been taken into state custody after her refusal.

Without the presence of a single doctor, the court decided to put the child on five powerful anti-psychotic drugs, even though none of these drugs have been approved by the FDA for use in children.

Peter Breggin, M.D., author of Toxic Psychiatry and other books about the use of psychiatric drugs, maintains that no psychiatric drug treatment corrects or improves existing brain dysfunction (such as a biochemical imbalance.) This, he says, is a major misunderstanding about psychiatry that the profession tries to hide because it places these drugs outside the scope of proper treatment for mental disorders.

The central reason for today's mental health diagnoses run amok is the fact that without a diagnosis code, your insurance company cannot reimburse your mental health provider.

All mental health diagnoses are codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), originally published in 1952 by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). At that time, it had 112 entries.

Since then the APA has added hundreds more, based on the current whims of the profession and the most current in-vogue maladies.

The current DSM-IV and the soon to be released DSM-V include such gems as:

• Mathematics disorder

• Caffeine disorder

• Disorder of Written Expression

• Telephone Scatialogia

• Malingering 

These absurd codes make it possible for your mental health professional to invoice for your visit, no matter how normal or innocent the real problem might be. And with the bill comes a label, and most often a drug.

• The New American September 17, 2007

http://thenewamerican.com/node/5372

"Recently, I participated in a typically dull hearing that likely ruined a life — the life of a little six-year-old mildly autistic boy. The banality of the process was in contrast with the seriousness of the outcome."