The Matt Walsh Show - November 19, 2018


Ep. 146 - The Terrible Potential Consequences Of Giving Psychiatric Drugs To Kids


Episode Stats

Length

28 minutes

Words per Minute

147.83101

Word Count

4,270

Sentence Count

287

Misogynist Sentences

2


Summary

9-year-old Maddie Whitsett was found dead in her closet after coming home from school. Her family suspects that ADHD meds may have played a role in her death. What can we learn from this case, and what does it tell us about these drugs?


Transcript

00:00:00.120 Today on the Matt Wall Show, we're going to discuss the terrible, tragic case of a young child who committed suicide.
00:00:06.540 Could her ADHD medicine have played a role in the tragedy? Her parents think so.
00:00:10.780 So what can we learn from this case, and what does it tell us about these drugs,
00:00:14.880 and how we should approach these drugs, and how cautious we should be about putting our kids on these drugs?
00:00:20.340 We'll talk about all of that on the Matt Wall Show.
00:00:22.060 Well, this is a horrific story, just horrible, and I could barely stand to talk about it,
00:00:34.220 but I think we need to talk about it.
00:00:36.960 Last week, a nine-year-old girl named Maddie Whitsett, she was in the fourth grade, and she hanged herself, committed suicide.
00:00:46.460 Now, her parents have said that their daughter came home from school that day.
00:00:54.540 This was, I believe, last Monday. She came home from school, apparently in a fine mood.
00:00:59.360 They were going to go to Chick-fil-A. She was excited about that, running around the house.
00:01:02.760 As you can imagine, if you have kids at home and you tell them you're going out to eat somewhere,
00:01:07.300 they get really excited about that.
00:01:08.360 So she was running around the house, excited, and then she went up to her room,
00:01:12.360 and her mom went up a little bit later to get her and let her know it's time to go to lunch,
00:01:17.800 and that's when she found her daughter hanging in the closet.
00:01:24.460 Now, of course, you can't even begin to contemplate the horror of a scene like that.
00:01:32.100 I mean, it's just unthinkable.
00:01:34.640 It's the worst thing. It's the worst thing in the world.
00:01:39.380 It's the worst thing that anyone could ever experience, and my heart aches for her parents.
00:01:45.800 It's horrific.
00:01:51.560 Well, when something like this happens, of course, the obvious question is,
00:01:55.820 the crucial question is why and how, you know.
00:02:00.840 And to that end, it turns out that Maddie was often bullied at school.
00:02:05.320 She had been subjected, apparently, to an especially vicious round of bullying on that particular day,
00:02:12.200 according to her friends.
00:02:13.900 So we know that bullying played a role here.
00:02:16.920 It was a factor.
00:02:18.980 And there is no question that kids can be really vicious to each other.
00:02:23.260 And sometimes it's hard for us as adults,
00:02:25.840 sometimes, to remember what it was like to be a child
00:02:31.820 and to be rejected by your peers.
00:02:35.020 It's a very devastating thing for kids.
00:02:37.560 It's hard for adults to deal with, too, but especially for kids.
00:02:41.020 Because it's the kind of thing that a child is just not equipped to deal with.
00:02:45.860 I still remember the first time that my daughter was really kind of, I guess,
00:02:52.940 bullied by someone, by a girl that she knows, thought was a friend, I guess.
00:02:58.760 And I remember my daughter coming home that day,
00:03:02.180 and she was really sad, and she was telling me about the way this girl had treated her.
00:03:07.600 But what struck me is that she was not only sad, but she was confused.
00:03:13.240 She didn't understand why somebody would treat her that way.
00:03:18.580 She didn't understand cruelty.
00:03:20.780 It just was a concept that was new to her.
00:03:23.700 And so that's why kids oftentimes have so much trouble dealing with these things,
00:03:28.840 because they're not cynical.
00:03:30.220 They don't have the cynicism that you and I have,
00:03:33.180 where when someone's a jerk to us, we're just like,
00:03:37.200 well, that's how people are.
00:03:38.440 We're not surprised by it, because we've been jaded by the world,
00:03:41.860 and we're such cynical people.
00:03:44.300 Kids aren't like that.
00:03:45.560 They just, they like everyone.
00:03:48.080 They love everyone.
00:03:48.620 They expect everyone to treat them that way.
00:03:50.120 And then when someone doesn't, they just can't,
00:03:51.840 they don't know how to cope with it, really.
00:03:56.260 So when a child is subjected to this kind of stuff incessantly
00:04:01.980 over a long period of time,
00:04:03.600 and then they go, they take their own lives,
00:04:07.260 obviously you can draw a very sad connection between those kinds of things.
00:04:13.760 But her family suspects that something else might have also played a role.
00:04:20.200 ADHD medication.
00:04:23.260 Maddie's stepfather says that she had just recently,
00:04:26.000 the girl had just recently begun taking a new drug for ADHD,
00:04:29.220 and one of the side effects listed for the drug is suicidal thoughts.
00:04:37.360 So we will never know for sure what was going on inside Maddie's mind that day.
00:04:44.660 But her parents don't think it's a coincidence
00:04:47.100 that she started taking a psychotropic medication
00:04:49.740 that causes suicidal thoughts a few weeks before she committed suicide.
00:04:54.480 And who can argue with them?
00:04:57.720 And when you think about it intuitively,
00:05:00.380 it just, the suicide of a young child
00:05:02.700 just seems already like something that had to have been caused
00:05:07.680 by an outside force, by a foreign agent of some kind,
00:05:11.580 because children that age shouldn't have the idea of suicide
00:05:16.400 anywhere on their radar.
00:05:18.600 They shouldn't even know what it is, right?
00:05:21.380 I mean, it's a terrible shock for anyone to commit suicide.
00:05:24.640 Suicide is a horrible, tragic, unnatural thing for anyone at any age.
00:05:32.340 But a nine-year-old?
00:05:34.320 How is that even possible?
00:05:36.860 How is it even possible for a nine-year-old to even think of that?
00:05:42.980 And, you know, people who are a little bit older,
00:05:49.480 they'll always say, they'll say,
00:05:52.320 well, when I was a kid, this kind of stuff didn't happen.
00:05:54.820 You didn't have kids committing suicide when I was younger.
00:05:59.100 If you talk to someone who's 50 or 60 years old,
00:06:01.300 that's what they'll tell you.
00:06:03.460 And they're on to something.
00:06:06.740 Okay?
00:06:06.960 They're not just making that up.
00:06:08.040 In fact, the statistics bear this out.
00:06:10.760 That stories like Maddie's are much more common now than they used to be.
00:06:17.900 Studies have consistently shown this.
00:06:20.180 There was a study done recently that shows that the number of children
00:06:23.060 who attempted or contemplated suicide has doubled in just the past decade.
00:06:29.260 Okay?
00:06:29.440 So just in the last 10 years, it's doubled.
00:06:32.220 Doubled.
00:06:32.880 Think about that.
00:06:33.580 And we know that this is a multifaceted phenomenon.
00:06:39.780 It can't be blamed on any one single factor.
00:06:42.280 So it would be oversimplifying in the extreme to say that,
00:06:45.480 okay, well, here's this thing, and here's what causes it, and that's it.
00:06:48.940 We know that we can't do that.
00:06:51.860 But I think we make a mistake when we just chalk it up to bullying,
00:06:55.760 and then we barely even consider what the other factors might be.
00:06:59.580 Because the fact is, kids have always been bullied.
00:07:02.280 And as I said, bullying for children is really difficult to deal with.
00:07:06.560 We know that.
00:07:07.160 And we don't want to understate that or underestimate it.
00:07:12.440 But we also know that bullying has been in the world since time immemorial,
00:07:18.160 yet kids have not always committed suicide at a rate like this.
00:07:22.040 So that means that something else is clearly going on here.
00:07:25.540 And we also know that as the suicide rate among children has increased exponentially,
00:07:33.920 so have the number of children prescribed psychiatric drugs.
00:07:37.520 There are currently over, I think it's over 7 million kids,
00:07:41.940 pushing 8 million kids right now who are on some kind of psychotropic medication.
00:07:46.580 Over half of them are being treated for ADHD.
00:07:49.260 Now, we know that correlation does not prove causation.
00:07:55.040 So just because you've got, we know we have an increase in psychotropic medication among kids,
00:07:59.840 an exponential increase, and then we also have an exponential increase in suicide.
00:08:04.700 So we know that these two things are increasing together.
00:08:07.880 That doesn't prove that the one causes the other.
00:08:12.560 But I do think that there's enough correlation here to at least make us wary about dosing our kids with this stuff.
00:08:22.240 And the drug companies obviously know that there is a connection between suicide and the stuff that they're producing,
00:08:29.540 because that's why they list it as a side effect.
00:08:32.220 In fact, just a couple of years ago, health officials in Canada mandated that the companies that make ADHD medication,
00:08:41.560 they have to make the suicide warnings clearer and stronger.
00:08:46.420 So we know that there's a connection.
00:08:49.140 Nobody can deny it.
00:08:50.040 Even the drug companies know it.
00:08:51.220 They also know, and studies have shown this as well, that when you give psychiatric medication to children,
00:08:59.960 it does leave a lasting mark on the developing brains of children.
00:09:06.620 Now, they might not want to talk about this.
00:09:08.460 They might not want to admit it.
00:09:09.860 But we know that.
00:09:11.980 Now, we don't know exactly what those long-term effects are,
00:09:17.760 or how they might manifest themselves, or how long the effects might last.
00:09:22.420 There's a lot we don't know.
00:09:24.580 And the people who want to defend these drugs, they're going to be quick to say this.
00:09:28.700 They're going to say, well, you know, you can't, it's not a one-to-one thing.
00:09:32.260 There's not a straightforward connection that can be drawn between, you know,
00:09:37.340 suicide and these drugs, or violent behavior and the drugs.
00:09:41.360 Well, that's true, but that's just because we don't have all the information.
00:09:44.820 There's a pediatric psychologist named Ronald Brown, and here's how he put it.
00:09:51.440 He said, there is more use of psychotropic medication with children than there is research data on it.
00:09:59.380 Let me read that again.
00:10:00.700 There is more use of psychotropic medication with children than there is research data on it.
00:10:06.380 So our, the prescribing of these drugs has way outpaced the information and the data we have about how these drugs might affect our kids.
00:10:23.720 That's, that is, that's a problem.
00:10:25.720 And I would think that the lack of information, the lack of data, rather than that giving us a reason to just say, oh, well, we might as well just keep giving it to kids.
00:10:36.140 That's a reason to pull back and to slow down and to exercise extreme caution before prescribing these substances to children.
00:10:46.320 But that apparently is not how the drug companies and the medical establishment sees it.
00:10:53.220 So they just keep churning out the pills and they, they, they shove this stuff down the throats of our children.
00:10:58.100 And they issue these assurances that, uh, that it's all perfectly safe.
00:11:05.120 Safe?
00:11:06.540 How can you even say that?
00:11:08.000 How can you tell me that it might make a fourth grader consider suicide, but it's safe?
00:11:17.220 And how can you tell me that it might make a child hallucinate and it might alter her personality.
00:11:23.200 It might make her violent.
00:11:24.340 It might make her aggressive, but it's safe.
00:11:29.000 And let's keep something in mind here.
00:11:30.720 Um, childhood suicide is just one of the awful and increasingly common phenomena that could be linked to psychiatric drugs.
00:11:40.180 Um, another one that we don't, that we don't talk about enough is mass shootings.
00:11:47.000 Dozens of violent attacks in schools and, and school shootings have been carried out by kids who are on or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs.
00:11:55.980 And not just kids, the Las Vegas shooter was on anxiety medicine.
00:12:00.780 Um, the Colorado theater shooter was on antidepressants.
00:12:03.780 The Charleston shooter was on psychotropic drugs.
00:12:07.000 The Virginia tech shooter was on psychic psychotropic drugs.
00:12:10.380 Uh, at least one of the, the Columbine shooters was on psychotropic drugs.
00:12:13.900 The list goes on and on.
00:12:15.960 Now, can prescription medication be solely blamed for any of these attacks?
00:12:21.620 No, of course not.
00:12:22.620 Again, this is, this is a multifaceted phenomenon.
00:12:26.720 And, uh, and, and anytime you're dealing with something like this, when someone does something as extreme as carrying out a shooting or committing suicide, um, there are always going to be multiple factors that go into it.
00:12:44.160 But I don't think it's incidental.
00:12:46.920 Okay.
00:12:47.180 It is not incidental that so many mass shooters have been on psychotropic drugs.
00:12:52.340 I think it's foolish.
00:12:54.200 I think it's idiotic for us to say, well, yeah, you know, that's just a coincidence.
00:13:00.680 It's clearly not a coincidence.
00:13:03.240 Just like it's clearly not a coincidence that Maddie Witsett committed suicide while taking a drug that might cause a child to contemplate suicide.
00:13:13.800 Now, I think what we have to realize here is that drug companies and doctors are playing on a field that they don't really understand.
00:13:29.340 And they are making determinations that they really don't have the authority or the ability to make.
00:13:36.760 So, what I mean is, in the case of ADHD, okay, um, what they've said is that kids, uh, who behave a certain way and who think a certain way and who are a certain way must be disordered.
00:13:54.060 Okay.
00:13:54.300 So, what they're saying, in other words, is that a child, they're looking at an ADHD child and they're saying, well, that child shouldn't be that way.
00:14:02.960 That is not how a child should be.
00:14:05.880 Okay.
00:14:06.120 Um, but that's, that's my problem.
00:14:11.640 You see, that, that's my point.
00:14:13.020 And that's been my point with ADHD for years now.
00:14:16.140 I'm not saying that ADHD people don't exist.
00:14:22.480 We clearly know they exist.
00:14:23.920 So, anytime we have this conversation and someone says, well, you haven't met my son.
00:14:27.980 My son is, he's bouncing off the walls.
00:14:30.220 He's running around.
00:14:31.100 Are you saying that my son doesn't exist?
00:14:33.160 No, I know that your son exists.
00:14:34.600 Like, I'm not denying the existence of your son or my own son, by the way, who, who's exactly the same way.
00:14:40.960 Just bursting with energy, running around, can't stop talking, can't stop moving.
00:14:46.560 Uh, that's exactly how my son is.
00:14:48.120 I have no doubt whatsoever in my mind that if I took my child to my son to a doctor and said, doc, does he have ADHD?
00:14:55.900 They would say, yes, absolutely.
00:14:57.760 But I'm not going to take my kid to a doctor and ask that question, um, because, yes, I know that these kinds of behaviors exist.
00:15:07.920 But the label, it's the, it is, it, the decision to label it a disorder, okay, that is what is man-made.
00:15:20.880 That's invented.
00:15:22.280 That is subjective.
00:15:26.080 Who decided?
00:15:27.520 Okay, we know that there are energetic kids who can't focus.
00:15:29.940 They talk.
00:15:30.420 They run around.
00:15:30.880 Fine.
00:15:31.100 Okay.
00:15:31.820 Who decided that that's wrong?
00:15:33.780 Why did we decide that kids aren't supposed to be that way?
00:15:38.680 How did we decide that that's in a disorder, that that is disordered behavior?
00:15:44.800 That's what I'm saying is completely subjective.
00:15:48.460 We, we made that up.
00:15:52.620 We have just declared that these kinds of people are sick because they don't gel with the systems that we have in place.
00:16:01.380 But that is not how a real medical diagnosis is supposed to work, okay?
00:16:07.980 The diagnosis of cancer is not subjective because it's not dependent on anything else, okay?
00:16:15.360 They don't diagnose cancer based on how much the cancer interferes with what else, whatever else you've got going on in your life.
00:16:22.860 They don't diagnose cancer by, by, by looking at the ways that it interferes with your schoolwork or your, you know, or your home life or whatever.
00:16:30.240 Cancer is cancer.
00:16:32.780 But with ADHD and with many other alleged mental disorders, we only consider it a disorder because of the situational problems that it causes.
00:16:45.580 So ADHD is not a problem at recess.
00:16:51.940 It's not a problem when a kid's on a playground.
00:16:53.820 It's not a problem when a kid's playing a kickball.
00:16:57.920 It's also oddly not a problem when a kid is playing video games or sitting down to watch TV.
00:17:03.620 I mean, all these parents are saying that their kids can't sit still.
00:17:06.700 I've yet to hear one parent tell me that a kid can't sit still to play a video game.
00:17:11.520 Oddly enough, every kid can manage that.
00:17:15.620 And I've never heard a parent say that a kid can't focus enough to play on the playground.
00:17:24.160 No, it's, it's with particular things that we want them to do.
00:17:28.920 They struggle to do those things.
00:17:31.020 And then we say, oh, well, they, they must be disordered if they can't manage to do this thing.
00:17:36.220 Now, um, it's true that, that some human behaviors are pretty clearly disordered.
00:17:46.040 Okay.
00:17:46.180 So someone who hallucinates, someone who has delusions, someone who suffers extreme paranoia, uh, obviously these are disordered behaviors.
00:17:55.300 Obviously this is a sign that something isn't right inside the head.
00:17:59.180 But wait, what, what, what makes ADHD so absurd is that what we're saying is, well, um, a child is supposed to be energetic, is supposed to be fidgety, is supposed to be talkative.
00:18:12.080 Uh, of course, a child is going to have trouble focusing.
00:18:14.660 Of course, a child is going to get bored doing schoolwork.
00:18:16.700 We know all that, but if, if he's too energetic and he's too fidgety and he's too talkative and he has too much trouble doing his schoolwork, then it's a disorder.
00:18:27.600 So we've drawn this completely arbitrary line and said that normal childhood behavior exists on this end of the, on this side of the line and abnormal disordered behavior is on this side.
00:18:40.900 Well, who decided where the line is?
00:18:43.300 We just, again, we just made that up.
00:18:45.560 Now, when it comes to delusional paranoia or hallucinations, okay, there is no, there is no amount of hallucinating that's normal.
00:18:54.980 Any amount of hallucinating, if you have hallucinated even a little bit, that is abnormal, that is disordered, and clearly there's something wrong in your head.
00:19:04.200 If you, if you experience any level of hallucinating whatsoever.
00:19:10.000 But with ADHD, we are taking normal behavior, drawing an arbitrary line and saying anything beyond that line is disordered.
00:19:20.260 That, again, that, again, is a determination that drug companies and doctors are not equipped to make.
00:19:27.780 This is like a philosophical decision that they're making.
00:19:33.620 They're saying that, well, a person, this is how a person is supposed to be.
00:19:38.400 And this is the exact proportion of behaviors, and here is the level of each kind of personality that they're supposed to have.
00:19:48.140 Do we ever stop to ask where they're getting any of that from?
00:19:54.300 No, we don't.
00:19:55.320 We just go along with it.
00:19:56.680 So they're making a determination that they're not equipped to make, and as I said, they are, they are, they are playing on a field that they don't really understand.
00:20:10.200 And that field is the human mind.
00:20:14.560 And I say the human mind and not the brain, because, because, okay, we, we know we have brains.
00:20:20.900 We have these, these physical things inside our heads, and we can look at those things and study them and everything else.
00:20:28.100 But we know that the brain somehow generates consciousness, okay?
00:20:33.760 And, and, and consciousness is what we call the mind.
00:20:36.600 Now, here's the thing, nobody actually understands how a physical thing, like a brain, can generate consciousness.
00:20:46.900 Nobody understands that.
00:20:48.640 No psychiatrist, no doctor, nobody working at any drug company actually fully understands how a brain can generate consciousness.
00:20:58.580 This is one of the great mysteries of life.
00:21:01.400 This is one of the things that people have been debating since the beginning of time.
00:21:04.980 Yet, with mental disorders, doctors are trying to treat disorders of consciousness, okay?
00:21:14.260 Not, not, not diseases of the brain.
00:21:17.880 Now, if ADHD was really a disease of the brain, we would just call it a brain disease.
00:21:24.140 And there are things that we call brain diseases.
00:21:27.860 Dementia, for instance, is a brain disease.
00:21:30.060 So, if a, if a, if a, if a, if a patient has dementia, you can do a scan of the brain.
00:21:36.320 You can look at their brain and you can see it.
00:21:38.720 You can see dementia happening in the brain.
00:21:42.780 And it's very obvious.
00:21:44.860 It's something, the brain is being physically destroyed, physically and, unfortunately, irreversibly destroyed.
00:21:51.760 So, that is a brain disease.
00:21:53.160 But with something like ADHD, you can't really do that.
00:21:59.100 It's called a mental disorder because we have decided that the mind isn't functioning how it's supposed to.
00:22:06.480 But we don't really know how the brain relates to or causes that malfunction.
00:22:12.540 We don't.
00:22:13.340 No matter what anyone says, we don't really know.
00:22:15.840 Because if we did know, they would be able to diagnose ADHD by doing a brain scan.
00:22:24.040 They wouldn't need to give you a personality survey.
00:22:26.440 They wouldn't need to ask you questions about how you're doing at school.
00:22:30.020 They could just look at the brain and see it.
00:22:33.140 But they don't diagnose it that way because they can't.
00:22:37.680 Because nobody really knows what the connection is.
00:22:40.640 So, we have erroneously declared that the mind isn't doing what it's supposed to.
00:22:49.820 And then we have set out to correct the mind, even though we don't really know what the mind is.
00:22:58.440 And that's what makes a side effect like suicidal thoughts so scary.
00:23:05.000 How can a drug give somebody a thought?
00:23:10.640 How can a drug, a pill that you put into your mouth, cause you potentially to think something?
00:23:19.560 And not just think something, but have a thought that you want to end your own existence.
00:23:26.920 I mean, just think about that.
00:23:29.300 These drug companies are giving things to our kids and telling us that, yeah, it probably won't happen.
00:23:35.460 It's rare, but it could cause your child to think that he wants to end his existence.
00:23:46.160 How can a drug do that?
00:23:49.080 They don't know.
00:23:50.860 They really don't know.
00:23:53.780 Yet they give it to our kids anyway.
00:23:55.420 I think you could really make the argument that it is never safe to give something to a child that might cause them to think about suicide.
00:24:13.680 Even if you tell me that there's only a 0.0001% chance, the fact that the drug has that ability, potentially, has that power,
00:24:25.340 and the fact that we understand so little about how it could even do that,
00:24:29.380 I think that's reason enough to, as I said, be extremely cautious with all of this stuff.
00:24:40.260 There might be, in extreme situations, if a child needs a drug like this,
00:24:51.400 I mean, in a life-saving situation, where there's something going so wrong with a child that they need the drug to save their life,
00:25:03.420 well, then that's one thing.
00:25:04.400 But the fact that we're being told, give this stuff to your kid so they can do their schoolwork,
00:25:12.280 how is that worth the trade-off?
00:25:18.700 The thing is, even if the drugs don't cause suicidal thoughts,
00:25:25.540 and, of course, the really scary thing is it's also hard.
00:25:28.460 You can't really quantify that.
00:25:30.620 So doctors might say, yeah, it could cause suicidal thoughts.
00:25:33.420 It probably won't.
00:25:34.840 It's very rare.
00:25:35.820 Well, how could they really know how rare it is?
00:25:38.180 How do they know exactly how many kids have had these thoughts after taking these drugs?
00:25:43.760 Again, they don't know.
00:25:45.680 No matter what they say, they have no way of knowing.
00:25:49.100 How are they supposed to know what thoughts are going on inside the head of a kid?
00:25:53.720 Well, the only way they know is if the kid says it.
00:25:55.860 But sadly, terribly, as we know with suicidal thoughts, most of the time, people who have these thoughts don't say it.
00:26:06.000 Either because with a kid, they don't really understand what the thought is.
00:26:09.140 They are scared.
00:26:10.600 They're embarrassed.
00:26:11.560 They're whatever.
00:26:12.460 They don't bring it up.
00:26:13.880 They're not going to tell you.
00:26:14.700 So we know that these drugs have that ability.
00:26:19.160 We know it does happen.
00:26:20.340 We don't know how often it happens.
00:26:22.840 We don't actually know how rare it is.
00:26:25.580 Nobody does.
00:26:27.260 Because we can't read someone's mind.
00:26:31.320 But even if you take ADHD medicine, even if it doesn't cause suicidal thoughts,
00:26:37.360 either way, it's the whole idea is that it's altering a child's personality.
00:26:45.200 So it's just take my son as an example.
00:26:49.560 Again, a child who certainly would qualify as ADHD, very energetic, running around, talking, all this kind of stuff.
00:26:57.880 Well, if I give him a drug and suddenly he's not acting that way anymore, well, that's a change in personality.
00:27:07.380 And what it also means, because right now my son runs around, does all that, because he wants to,
00:27:12.380 because that's how he wants to express himself.
00:27:15.660 So if you give him a drug and he stops acting that way, that means he doesn't want to act that way anymore.
00:27:21.260 So something has happened in his head to make it so that he doesn't desire to be that way anymore and to act that way.
00:27:29.180 But again, that's something with consciousness.
00:27:31.520 Something has been altered in his consciousness to make it so that he desires things differently and he experiences the world differently and he sees things differently.
00:27:43.000 So it's not a simple thing of, oh, it just calms him down.
00:27:46.640 It's not that simple.
00:27:47.500 We've clearly altered the way that his mind works, not just his brain, his mind.
00:27:55.140 And again, nobody knows exactly how that works or what the long-term effects might be.
00:28:01.800 Nobody knows.
00:28:04.520 And so I think the drug companies and many doctors are being very cavalier about this.
00:28:13.240 And although there's so much they don't know, and although there's a lot of information that they do know that should be concerning
00:28:20.820 and should cause them to slow down, but they don't, you know, they just can continue on anyway.
00:28:26.680 And more and more kids are put on these drugs.
00:28:29.260 And so I think it's time that we start forcing them to answer some tough questions and we start holding them accountable.
00:28:37.060 And that's something to think about.
00:28:38.460 And I would also ask that everyone pray for the family of Maddie Whitsett who are going through something that no family should ever have to go through.
00:28:50.260 Thanks for watching, everybody.
00:28:51.460 Thanks for listening.
00:28:52.680 Godspeed.