Becky Murphy is the force behind Involuntary Transformation.

Op-Ed

A MadMother: We Have a Duty To Protect Children

Becky Murphy
February 15, 2012

The recent reports by ABC News and the Senate Hearing on December 1, 2011, which was presided over by Senator Tom Carper, are the latest of many investigations and hearings into psychiatric drugs being used on foster children. But the fact is that the indiscriminate use of psychotropic drugs prescribed off-label is widespread, and not limited to children in foster care. Children who live with their parents often have the same safety and protection issues as children in foster care and experience equally harmful effects from the drugs.

When children are harmed instead of helped with psychiatric drugs it is always tragic. When the child lives with his or her parents, the parents can’t understand why the help—the medication—is not helping, but hurting.

My son was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy the month he turned seven years old. It is a neurological condition known to be caused by a brain injury, and can cause the same symptoms as schizophrenia. When he was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy, he also had been getting mental health treatment services for over three years and had a diagnosis of PTSD. He had this diagnosis because he had been the victim of violent assault when he was three years old and in foster care.

My children were in foster care due to my own failure to deal with the effects of my own traumatic childhood. I placed my sons in foster care, when I became unable to care for them. My youngest son was placed in a home that had twelve reports filed with Child Protective Services. After he was victimized, I believe that the State of Washington attempted to cover it up, with little regard for how this would cause my son further harm. I was not informed of the trauma my son had experienced.

Read the rest of this moving testimonial here.