Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, Truth Social, Twitter
“I was living in a body hijacked by the medication,” Danielle Gansky, now 29, told the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal delivered Wednesday a comprehensive report on the severe damage endured by children whose desperate parents succumb to pressure by school officials – often seeking greater manageability – possibly without exploration of other educational options or evaluation of other causes of behavior issues.
After a long series of prescribed drugs that included Prozac, Concerta, and Ativan, Gansky, who is still attempting to wean herself off fluvoxamine, an antidepressant, is now an adviser to an advocacy group that promotes the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“I didn’t have the words or authority to challenge what I was being told,” Gansky said.
A 2024 analysis of federal data from 2022 found that about 1 in 9 American children (11.4%, or 7.1 million) have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Over half – 53.6% - were prescribed ADHD medications. Additionally, 44.4% received behavioral treatment for ADHD and about a third, 30.1%, did not receive any treatment specific to ADHD.
“The decision to treat ADHD with medication is often made by desperate parents trying to keep their kids from falling behind or being kicked out of school or daycare, parents and mental health clinicians say,” the Journal authors Shalini Ramachandran, et al, noted. “For preschool-age kids, the drugs are often dispensed against pediatric guidelines, which call first for behavioral therapy, a treatment that can be hard to get. And mental health providers say the drugs are frequently prescribed to treat childhood trauma that has been misdiagnosed as ADHD.”
Often, however, “ADHD drugs are just the beginning,” the authors report, citing their analysis of Medicaid data from between 2019 and 2023 that reveals children who took drugs for ADHD were far more likely to be prescribed other psychotropic drugs throughout the next four years.
“The Journal compared about 166,000 children aged 3 to 14 who started on ADHD medications in 2019 to kids who didn’t,” they explained. “The medicated group was more than five times as likely to be on additional psychiatric medications four years later. Factors such as differences in sex, race and foster-care status didn’t explain the gap.”
Gansky was seven years old when an administrator from her private girls’ school in the greater Philadelphia area drew attention to her academic downturn. Though lively and creative, but she was easily distracted and her schoolwork was messy.
“The school told Gansky’s mother that the girl should see a psychiatrist, who diagnosed her with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and prescribed a stimulant,” the Journal reported. “Concerned that Danielle might get kicked out if her focus didn’t improve, her mother broke into tears and agreed. But the pills made Gansky agitated, moody and angry. So another doctor put her on Prozac.”
Gansky was prescribed other drugs as well – all of which, the authors noted, “dulled her mind and made her irritable or sleepy.”
“But when Gansky complained about the drugs, her doctors would up her dose or try another medication,” they added.
“The doctors would tell us, oh, that’s just her. She needs more medicine,” Gansky’s mother said. “I took it at face value.”
Still struggling with withdrawal from drugs, Gansky says they “changed my brain.”
“I feel like I am the real long-term study that the pharmaceutical companies have neglected to do,” she told the Journal. “I’m the real guinea pig.”
Read the stories of other children here.
Stay updated with the latest in the Constitution State with The CT Centinal
