Kaylee Rice died despite 18 state investigations - Florida

CHRIS OLWELL

Editor’s note: This story is based on interviews with friends and family of Kaylee Rice, people involved in the juvenile dependency system, and hundreds of pages of records from the Department of Children and Families, Big Bend Community Based Care, criminal and civil court files, and law enforcement.

PANAMA CITY BEACH — Even as her life descended into a spiral of abuse and addiction, Courtney Coughlin was determined to keep her daughter, Kaylee Ann Rice.

Coughlin gave up two other kids for adoption, an older girl and a younger boy, and Kaylee was removed from her care by the state on more than one occasion. Still, Coughlin fought to keep Kaylee.

Once she succeeded, said one woman who knew Kaylee, the child never stood a chance.

Kaylee was airlifted to Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in the hours after a July 11, 2011, car accident in Lynn Haven. She and mother Courtney Coughlin, a drug addict and ex-convict with a long criminal history, were not wearing seat belts. Coughlin’s facial muscles were pulled from her crushed skull, and she had missing teeth and limited vision in one eye.

Kaylee fared worse.

Twelve hours after the crash, an investigator with the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) filed a preliminary report of the findings of an investigation. The investigator interviewed only doctors; Kaylee was unconscious, father Ray Rice was in prison and her mother was in the hospital on her way to jail, where she would remain until she was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The investigator was there to assess the risk to Kaylee.

“The overall safety assessment at this time is low as it pertains to the parent/caregiver not having access for further abuse/neglect to the child. However, risk is increased due to the injuries Kaylee has sustained and her current condition may potentially be fatal.”

The report documented the 18th and final time DCF had investigated allegations Kaylee had been abused or neglected.

Coughlin and Rice met in the late ’90s when they were kicking around the beach, hanging out in clubs, partying and getting into drugs. Back then it was pot and valium; later it was meth and painkillers. They had dated about a month when Coughlin showed up with a small child, Rice remembered during an interview with The News Herald.

Both were more interested in partying than parenthood, and Coughlin decided to give her daughter up for adoption. The adoption was a strain on the relationship. Rice said he started thinking, “This chick might be crazy.”

She knew how to push his buttons, and “sometimes I would try to control her,” said Rice, who was arrested several times for domestic violence. “I’m not an angel by any means.”

Coughlin was pregnant again in December 1998 when she applied for a restraining order the day after one incident. She withdrew the request a week later.

“I lost one child, kind of, you know — that’s how I felt about it — and I was giving her something better,” Coughlin said in an interview. “… I wanted Kaylee to have both of her parents there, you know, just a normal upbringing. I wanted to give her everything I didn’t have.”

Six months later, on July 10, 1999, Kaylee Rice was born in a Bay County hospital to 21-year-old Rice and 23-year-old Coughlin. It was only a matter of months before the complaints to the police and the DCF began pouring in.

Both Rice and Coughlin were involved in a major meth manufacturing case in 2004 after Rice’s mother, Yurdanur “Sunny” Rice, took a trunk with a meth lab and more than 1,000 grams of meth oil to the dump at her son’s request. The meth had belonged to one of Ray Rice’s roommates. He had allowed the roommate to cook meth at his place, but he said he never cooked meth himself and court records support him.

He ended up in a federal prison. Coughlin, who was jittery and had fresh needle marks on her arms when police came, was not charged, but DCF again took custody of Kaylee, who began the least documented period of her short life.

Coughlin was arrested in December 2004 for aggravated assault for a road rage incident in which she allegedly pointed a gun at another driver. She entered a court-ordered rehab program, but quickly failed and ended up in prison.

Kaylee moved in with Charlene Hodge for the first time. The Hodges are a large Bonifay family made larger by the many children they have fostered over the years, but not too large to take Kaylee in 2004.

With the exception of a few months spent with another relative in Michigan, Kaylee spent the next year-and-a half with the Hodges.

“My family just considered her a part of our family,” Hodge said. “She just felt at home at our house.”

When she left the Hodges’ home, Kaylee moved in with Sunny Rice, who was appointed Kaylee’s caretaker in February 2007, about six months before Coughlin’s release from prison.

In December 2008, DCF received the first report regarding Kaylee in more than four years. Rice, then 71 years old, had fallen and broken her hip. She had been hospitalized and wouldn’t be capable of caring for herself, let alone a 9-year-old girl, for at least six months. Kaylee had been staying with various friends, mainly Sean and Melinda Hall.

The Halls didn’t mind looking after Kaylee, and Judge Elijah Smiley ordered Kaylee be placed with the family. Coughlin was allowed supervised visitation.

Coughlin was released from prison in August 2007. She was off drugs and determined to resume her life with the only child she had left.

She completed parenting courses, a mental health assessment, domestic violence awareness courses and substance abuse treatment. She paid child support. Her visits required supervision.

In May 2009, DCF developed a case plan with the stated goal of reuniting Coughlin and Kaylee. The law says that a child removed by the state cannot be returned until “the circumstances which caused the creation of the case plan have been significantly remedied to the extent that the well-being and safety of the child will not be endangered upon the child’s remaining with or being returned to the child’s parent.”

Big Bend Community Based Care, a private company that contracts with the state to monitor cases like Kaylee’s, cited federal and state laws when it refused to provide documents of Coughlin’s drug tests, but logs of in-home visits show Coughlin passed at least nine random drug tests before and after the reunion.

During an in-home visit at Sunny Rice’s by the case worker in July 2009, just before the reunion, the case worker noted in her report that Kaylee was “chippery and happy.” Kaylee said she wanted to live with her mother.

On Aug. 13, 2009, Judge James Fensom held a hearing to get an update on Coughlin’s progress. All drug tests were clean, and DCF recommended Kaylee’s reunification with her mother. Fensom called a brief recess and went into the hall to speak privately with Kaylee. When he returned, he ordered the reunification.

Rosemary Ring was Kaylee’s Sunday school teacher and a friend of Sunny Rice, who had hired a lawyer and tried to fight the reunification. She said she went to court with Sunny that day, and she was disappointed Fensom chose to put Kaylee with Coughlin instead of Sunny, who had taken the child to church, dance lessons and tennis lessons.

“Sunny was a good and moral person and she would have seen to K.K.’s care,” Ring said. “Courts don’t look at the moral aspect of it.”

Kaylee had been more or less born into the system. By her first birthday, Kaylee had been removed from home by child protection teams and returned. DCF had investigated allegations that Kaylee had been exposed to drugs or family violence five times before her second birthday, and investigators often found at least some indication the allegations were true.

Of course, just as often there was no evidence to support the allegations, the DCF is required to conduct investigations in any case, said Courtney Peel, operations manager for DCF in Bay County.

DCF has goals that at times seem to be in conflict. One is to protect children, and the other is to keep families together.

“It is, and I guess it should be, difficult to terminate a parent’s rights,” Fensom said.

A child must be in immediate danger for the DCF to take steps toward taking the child from the parents. Even then, DCF doesn’t have the authority to remove them; that decision must be made by a judge in a shelter hearing.

“Some judges are hesitant to work as a dependency judge because of the reality: some cases go bad,” said Fensom, who said Kaylee’s case isn’t the only one where a child has died as a result of abuse or neglect. It’s not even the most egregious — just the most public.

The work of a dependency court judge is difficult and emotional, Fensom said, because “everyone’s doing their best, then the case goes bad.”

After she won her daughter back, Coughlin remained under supervision of Big Bend Community Based Care. Case agents performed in-home visits for six months after the reunification to see Kaylee and ensure Coughlin was seeing to her needs. They also administered drug tests.

“She was doing extremely well, I thought,” Ray Rice said. “I was actually proud of her.”

Coughlin remembers exactly the day she relapsed. After seven years drug-free, four of which she spent in prison, she started taking painkillers May 14, 2010. It had been about three months since she had passed her final drug test and her case was closed. DCF no longer had the authority to compel a drug test.

She was despondent. Her girlfriend kicked her out of their apartment and Coughlin, who was almost immediately shooting up powerful narcotic painkillers, stole her checkbook on her way out the door. Within a month, she had attempted suicide and been committed.

“That’s what I want, for the suffering to stop,” Coughlin wrote in a suicide note to her ex-girlfriend. “I know that everyone will be better off with me out of their lives. I’m sorry for the pain I caused you. … I will never forgive myself for it coming to this.”

The day before she had allegedly stolen some painkillers from Sunny, and six months later the criminal charges were starting to stack up. She was arrested in February for grand theft and uttering a forged instrument for allegedly writing bad checks from her ex’s checkbook.

In March, Coughlin was arrested after she sold four oxycodone pills to a confidential police informant. Bob and Jacqui Coughlin, the grandparents who had raised Coughlin since childhood while her mother drank herself to death, let her sit in jail for two weeks, hoping she might sober up again.

During this period, Bob Coughlin and Charlene Hodge had several discussions about moving Kaylee back in with the Hodges. They both agreed it was best for Kaylee, and it was best to do it over the summer so she wouldn’t have to change schools mid-year, but Courtney Coughlin wouldn’t go for it.

“I had talked to Courtney several times in recent months about giving K.K. up, but she refused to consider it,” Bob Coughlin said. “We still knew we had to do something with her before too long.”

Hodge remembers a long conversation with the Coughlins just before Kaylee finished sixth grade. She didn’t go into details but she said she felt very strongly that Kaylee needed to come live with her again.

“Let’s just say that I kept talking to Kaylee and she was not a happy little girl. Her life was upside down,” Hodge said. “If they needed us, we would be there for them. A child’s security means everything.”

Everyone around Coughlin could tell she was falling apart. From his prison cell, Rice would call Kaylee and ask her if Coughlin was using. Kaylee said she wasn’t, but he felt she was either covering for her mother or didn’t know. He considered reporting Coughlin to DCF, but he didn’t.

“I knew Courtney was messing up. I knew she was on drugs,” he said. “I didn’t want Kaylee to be mad at me for taking her away.”

On July 11, Coughlin was trying to cash a check that wasn’t hers. Police came to the Lynn Haven bank and pinned her in, but she stomped the accelerator and took off. She made it less than a mile.

From the wreckage of the car, investigators recovered purses and checkbooks that belonged to other women. They also found needles and a blackened spoon that tested positive for narcotics.

Two days later at Sacred Heart, staff busied themselves making arrangements with Coughlin and Rice for permission to allow their daughter’s organs to be donated. Knowing Kaylee’s heart still beats in the chest of another child is a comfort to Rice.

“I know Kaylee would’ve wanted that because she was such a sweet girl,” he said.

He’s torn up that he wasn’t there for his little girl. He used to apologize to her over the phone from the prison until she’d forgive him.

“ ‘Daddy stop already; stop that. I forgive you,’ ” he remembered her as saying. “That meant a lot, especially now; I’m so glad that she said that.”

Momma Hodge, as Kaylee referred to her, went in to be with Kaylee while the rest of her family waited in the lobby.

“I just wanted to get to her and hold her hand and let her know that I was there,” Hodge said. “I was the only one with her.”

Doctors and nurses watched with tears in their eyes. For hours after the machines that had kept Kaylee alive were turned off, Hodge was there.

Source http://www.newsherald.com/news/state-99695-died-editor.html

Petition To Stop Drugging Of Children In Foster Care

Stop Over-prescription of Psychotropic Drugs for Foster Children

Target: U.S. Congress

Goal: Investigate and stop over-prescription of antipsychotic drugs to foster children.

Recent studies show a disturbing over-prescription of antipsychotic drugs for children in foster care. Foster children often receive more than one prescription of powerful psychotropic drugs like Seroquel and Zyprexa, drugs used to treat severe bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in adults. Tell Congress to investigate these dangerous and irresponsible medical practices and illegal use of Medicaid funds to pay for them.

Studies exposing the disturbing trends of over-prescription of psychotropic drugs began in the early 2000s. For example, a 2003 study in Florida found that 55% of foster children in the state had been prescribed psychotropic drugs, 40% of them without even receiving a psychiatric evaluation. A 2004 study in Texas found that 34.7% of foster children in the state were receiving one or more anti-psychotic drug.

The problem is that drugs like Zyprexa or Seroquel which were designed for serious psychiatric conditions in adults are being prescribed for foster children with behavioral problems. Combining one or more of these medications is even more dangerous, as these medications can be known to cause depression in young children. That’s what happened in the case of Gabriel Meyers, a nine year old foster child taking Symbyax, an anti-depressant not meant for children, who killed himself in 2009 after an altercation with his foster brother. Gabriel’s doctor was cited by the FDA for over-prescribing the drug.

Medicaid pays for the medical treatment of foster children but there are supposed to be guidelines in place that prevent Medicaid from paying for these prescriptions that are not meant for children. What is occurring is a costly abuse of government money with fatal consequences.

Recent studies still show that foster children are receiving dangerous cocktails of psychotropic drugs at alarming rates. Senator Tom Carper has asked the General Accountability to look into this shocking disregard for children’s health and abuse of government funds. Sign the petition and demand that Congress addresses this problem now.

Sign the Petition by clicking HERE

Drugs Used for Psychotics Go to Youths in Foster Care

Blogger note:
This article states that psych doctors get very little money for drugging children in foster care but what it fails to report is that the states make money by drugging the children in state care. They get this extra money by giving the children the title of "special needs." States collect more money for special needs children from the federal government than they do for children that are not special needs. That is why states usually use their own psyc doctors and will not seek a second opinion in coming up with diagnoses that require these drugs. Independent doctors are less likely to agree with the use of psychotropic and antipsychotics for children.
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Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.

The report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to investigate how often youngsters in foster care are given two antipsychotic drugs at once, the authors said. The drugs include Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — among other so-called major tranquilizers — which were developed for schizophrenia but are now used as all-purpose drugs for almost any psychiatric symptoms.

“The kids in foster care may come from bad homes, but they do not have the sort of complex medical issues that those in the disabled population do,” said Susan dosReis, an associate professor in the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and the lead author.

The implication, Dr. dosReis and other experts said: Doctors are treating foster children’s behavioral problems with the same powerful drugs given to people with schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder. “We simply don’t have evidence to support this kind of use, especially in young children,” Dr. dosReis said.

In recent years, doctors and policy makers have grown concerned about high rates of overall psychiatric drug use in the foster care system, the government-financed program that provides temporary living arrangements for 400,000 to 500,000 children and adolescents. Previous studies have found that children in foster care receive psychiatric medications at about twice the rate among children outside the system.

The new study focused on one of the most powerful classes of drugs, antipsychotics. It found that about 2 percent of foster children took at least one such drug, even though schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, for which the drugs are approved, are extremely rare in young children.

“It’s a significant and important finding, and it should prompt states to improve the quality of care in this area,” said Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University who did not contribute to the research.

In the study, mental health researchers analyzed 2003 Medicaid records of 637,924 minors from an unidentified mid-Atlantic state who were either in foster care, getting disability benefits for a diagnosis like severe autism or bipolar disorder, or in a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. All of these programs draw on Medicaid financing. The investigators found that 16,969, or about 3 percent of the total, had received at least one prescription for an antipsychotic drug.

Yet among these, it was the foster children who most often got more than one such prescription at the same time: 9.2 percent, versus 6.8 percent among the children on disability, and just 2.5 percent of those in the needy families program.

Antipsychotic drugs, the authors said, also cause rapid weight gain and increase the risk for metabolic problems in many people, an effect that may be amplified by the use of two at once.

Doctors who treat such children are aware of the trade-offs and often prescribe lower doses of the medications as a result. And when they add a second such drug, it is often to counteract side effects of the first medication.

Still, the relatively high rates of these drug combinations in such a young and vulnerable group have prompted policy makers across the country to take notice. A consortium of 16 states, in collaboration with Rutgers University, has drawn up guidelines to improve care for foster children and others dependent on state aid.

“The psychiatrists who are treating these kids on the front lines are not doing it for money; there are very low reimbursement rates from Medicaid,” said Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, a mental health services researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. “There’s enormous anguish because everyone knows that this is not what we should be doing for these kids. We as a society simply haven’t made the investment in psychosocial treatments, and so we are forced to rely on psychotropic drugs to carry the burden.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/health/research/study-finds-foster-children-often-given-antipsychosis-drugs.html?_r=1

Indiana child welfare supervisor faces charges

GREENSBURG, Ind.— An Indiana child welfare supervisor who was the caseworker for a slain 12-year-old Greensburg boy faces charges after allegedly giving a client a drug and sending her a photo of his genitals.

Indiana State Police arrested 28-year-old Scott Ogden of Greensburg last week. WRTV-TV and WISH-TV report he's charged with dealing a controlled substance, official misconduct, and distribution of obscene matter.

Court records show he sent text messages to a woman who lost custody of her children and offered information about them in return for sex. He also gave her three prescription painkiller pills.

Ogden was the case worker for 12-year-old Devin Parsons, who was beaten to death by his mother in June.

A telephone message seeking comment was left at the Greensburg home a man named Scott Ogden.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-in--greensburgchildd,0,3823164.story

Oklahoma - DHS finds funding for benefits, legal defense

By GINNIE GRAHAM World Staff Writer

OKLAHOMA CITY - About $10 million in one-time funding has been found in the budget for the Oklahoma Department of Human Services to avoid cutting benefits in two low-income programs and to add $1 million to defend a class-action lawsuit.

On Tuesday, the commission overseeing the agency approved the expenditures, which include avoiding proposed hikes in child-care subsidy co-payments and avoiding lowering monthly assistance to a program for families with developmentally disabled children.

Commissioners also voted to use the money toward the class-action lawsuit filed by New York-based Children's Rights alleging abuse in the foster care system. Trial is set for February in the U.S. Northern District Court in Tulsa.

This brings the total cost of litigation to at least $9 million for private attorneys - $6 million already spent and $2 million previously planned for next year.

DHS Director Howard Hendrick said the funds are from amounts carried over from previous years. He said a new process allows officials to identify carryover funds earlier.

Hendrick said without new funding in the 2013 budget, these cuts may still need to be made.

"We would have found it eventually in January, February or March," Hendrick said. "We have a lot of one-time funds paying for recurring costs, and that's the biggest pause I have about the recommendation. But it's the right thing to do to push on through."

During discussion, Commissioner Jay Dee Chase cut off Commissioner Steven Dow from asking questions and called for a vote on the changes and monthly financial report, which had not been presented.

Procedure allows for further discussion and Dow asked for a "friendly amendment" for a separate vote on the service programs and legal fees.

"I don't accept that," Chase said. "My motion is made and seconded and I don't want to change it."

Dow said he wanted to explore if the $1 million could be used toward increasing foster-care subsidies or in the field offices.

"I'd like to have a conversation and discussion on where else we could spend $1 million before it goes to litigation costs," Dow said.

Commissioner Brad Yarbrough asked Chase to amend the motion so the board could hear the monthly financial report before making an approval.

Commissioners passed the changes by a 7-1 vote, with Dow dissenting.

The meeting ended with a vote to settle a 2007 lawsuit filed by a former foster child, who was subjected to "horrific acts of sexual abuse" by his foster father and his live-in boyfriend.

DHS commissioners and agency attorney Charles Waters refused to state the amount of the settlement or how it is being paid.

Terms were discussed in executive session, and the 7-1 approval was taken in open session.

According to the Oklahoman, the commissioners voted to pay a share of the $1.1 million settlement. The attorneys blacked out the settlement amount in the court papers, but The Oklahoman was able to calculate the amount of the overall settlement because attorneys asked for $308.90 in daily interest until it is paid.

Dow was the lone vote against the settlement and said he has not seen a proposed settlement agreement document.

"I personally did not feel I had enough advance knowledge or notice to make an informed decision," Dow said. "I was uncomfortable being brought in at the last minute."

The victim was a 15-year-old boy in Cleveland County who was placed in the home of Paul Stephen Hull in December 2005, the court records state. Shadow Mountain Behavioral Health System was named in the lawsuit as a contractor with DHS and had a hand in the boy's foster placement.

Hull's live-in lover, Erwin Charles Swender, started molesting the victim, and Hull joined in after the third or fourth assault, records state.

Swender had spent time in an Iowa juvenile facility as a 16-year-old after causing the death of a 22-month-old by hitting the toddler three to four times, according to court records and Iowa media reports.

He had a history with DHS, resulting in the termination of his parental rights to at least seven of his children.

DHS removed him for a few days in February 2006 because of concerns about conditions there. He was returned to the home after Hull agreed to a safety plan, which included keeping Swender away.

The lawsuit alleges Hull ignored the plan, with Swender continuing to live in the home and the two continuing to abuse the boy. DHS removed him for good when he finally told a counselor about the abuse.

The victim said he was abused for several weeks and was exposed to drugs and pornography.

Hull - a former teacher at Oklahoma City's Capitol Hill High School - pleaded guilty in 2007 to attempted rape, forcible sodomy, second-degree rape, lewd molestation and meth possession. He agreed to eight years in prison and to testify against Swender.

Swender pleaded guilty as jury selection began in 2007 to lewd acts with a child, forcible sodomy and meth possession. He was sentenced to 20 years.

The lawsuit alleges DHS left the victim in the home despite suspicions that Hull was ignoring the safety plan.

Since 2005, DHS has paid at least $3.4 million to settle child-welfare lawsuits, according to a Tulsa World investigation. That is in addition to the defense of the class-action lawsuit.

Source http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20111026_11_A1_CUTLIN294857

Sex, Drugs, and Child Protective Services

 

The BS Behind Psychiatric DSM - Fraud Of Drugging People

While CPS is busy creating "special needs" children from normal children that they remove from the homes of loving families, the drug companies, doctors, the states, and even the foster homes or institutions are fattening their pockets. (Once a child is deemed "special needs", the federal government pays more money to all involved with that child.)

In drugging these innocent children, they are destroying their developing brains.

How, just how, do all involved in this fraud sleep at night knowing that they are lobotomizing the very children they claim to be protecting and caring for? How?!!





Psychiatry Exposed Part 1


Psychiatry Exposed Part 2


Psychiatry Exposed Part 3


Psychiatry Exposed Part 4


Psychiatry Exposed Part 5


Psychiatry Exposed Part 6
http://youtu.be/M6mDtNSVTpU

Psychiatry Exposed Part 7
http://youtu.be/QVpSE1UtxHs

Psychiatry Exposed Part 8


Psychiatry Exposed Part 9


Psychiatry Exposed Part 10


Psychiatry Exposed Part 11


Psychiatry Exposed Part 12


Psychiatry Exposed Part 13


Psychiatry Exposed Part 14


Psychiatry Exposed Part 15

Child Protective Services Worker Jailed

Woman faces drug distribution and weapons charges, police say.
Date published: 8/17/2011

By PORTSIA SMITH

A Spotsylvania County Child Protective Services worker and two family members face drug charges in Westmoreland County.

According to Westmoreland Sheriff C.O. Balderson, a search warrant was executed July 25 at a home in the 100 block of Stratford Circle in Colonial Beach.

Investigators reported seizing prescription drug pills, drug paraphernalia, a firearm and an undisclosed amount of cash, Balderson said.

Upon further investigation, three Colonial Beach residents were charged this week.

Sherry Heslop-Dazy, 48, who works as a child protective services worker in Spotsylvania, was arrested Tuesday and charged with distribution of a controlled substance, possession with intent to distribute, possession of a firearm while possessing a controlled substance and conspiring to distribute a controlled substance.

Her husband, 42-year-old Kenneth R. Dazy, is charged with two counts of distributing a controlled substance, conspiring to distribute a controlled substance, possession of a firearm while possessing a controlled substance and possession of a firearm while being a convicted felon.

The couple's son-in-law, William J. Whitlock, 33, is also charged with possession of a controlled substance.

All three are being held without bond at the Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw.

Kenneth Dazy was already incarcerated on unrelated charges prior to these charges, Balderson said.

"Having the capability to use technology in order to monitor communication enabled us to not only further our investigation, but to obtain several indictments and arrest these individuals," Balderson said.

Sherry Dazy and Whitlock will appear in Westmoreland Circuit Court on Friday. Kenneth Dazy will make his next appearance on Monday.

Source: http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2011/082011/08172011/1313607603fls

52% of foster kids are prescribed psych drugs—One of them is fighting back

By CCHR Int - Original Article 06-23-2011

At just 6 years of age, still grieving over the death of the only mother he’d ever known, his foster mother, Giovan Bazan received the first of many psychiatric “diagnoses” and drugs that would plague him for the next twelve years of his life. Moved from foster home to foster home, orphanages and other modes of state care, Giovan was stigmatized with a plethora of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs until the age of 18, when he could finally make his own medical decisions and quit. Now a child advocate working part time at the Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) in Georgia, Giovan is on a mission: To get a full-time job with DFCS and help enact laws to combat the wholesale labeling and drugging of foster children. In the video below, Giovan tells his story and why he decided to fight back against the abuse of kids in foster care.


Foster kids—often removed from family homes because of abuse—are further abused when they are prescribed psychotropic drugs under state care. Many of these children are on cocktails of prescribed drugs, including antipsychotics and antidepressants with documented side effects of diabetes, stroke, mania, psychosis, tumors, coma, suicide and death.

Yet, the rates with which these children are being given drugs has been increasing. The antipsychotic use rate among foster kids increased by 5.6% between 2004 and 2007 (from 11.7 percent to 12.4 percent). Another study in Pediatrics, revealed that youth in foster care covered by Medicaid insurance receive psychotropic medication at a rate more than 3 times that of Medicaid-insured youth who qualify by low family income.

Only half of state child welfare systems have a policy to review usage of these drugs, and those are weak policies at that.

The psychiatric drugging of foster kids has caused so much concern nationally that in July 2010, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) started an investigation into the use of these drugs in foster care, as they are widely used in dangerous combinations, and for so-called “off-label” uses to treat symptoms for which they have not been medically approved. The GAO is looking into the estimated hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud arising from this and is collecting and analyzing data from Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon and Texas.

The Medication Of Foster Children

Jan. 7, 2011

A recent 16-state study from Rutgers University on the use of antipsychotics in children and adolescents covered by Medicaid found that foster children received antipsychotic medications at a rate almost nine times that of other children covered by Medicaid.

Here is a PBS video about children in foster care being drugged.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.