The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Keeping this brief, to hopefully avoid straying into culture war territory:
There's a family my wife and I are acquainted with. This family has had a long history of behavior problems with their kids; the second-youngest male kid, approaching the tweens, has been having a lot of temper tantrums, screaming at and shaking his siblings, including his much younger sibling, and so on. It seems very likely that this is a behavioral problem, not a biologically-rooted issue, since he has these problems exclusively at home and not, say, at school. The parents are fairly Blue, and have been employing therapy/psychological professionals as part of their response to their kids' behavioral issues, so they did so once this behavior began manifesting.
A couple weeks ago, during a dinner catch-up, we learned that the counselor they were seeing for this particular kid's issues had prescribed him an antipsychotic which they had been administering to him on a regular basis.
I am not a psychologist, but the subject comes up a fair bit in the rationalist community. My understanding is that antipsychotics have extremely serious side effects, to the point that we as a society would never have considered approving them for conditions that were not as severely dangerous and debilitating as actual psychosis. My understanding is that the kid in question definately does not have any form of actual psychosis, only a fairly bad temper control problem. I expressed concern at the time, the parents looked into it more than they had previously, were horrified at what they found, and are now no longer administering the antipsychotics... which means the kid only got a regular dose for something like several months straight.
My question, to those with more knowledge and experience of the mental health profession and its tools and practices: is this as bad as it seems to me, and how much of an outlier should I consider this incident? Is this happening very surprising, or kinda what one would expect? My impression is that the counseler got their kid on an entirely-inappropriate and very dangerous medication with essentially zero concern for the kid's well-being, and having made no effort to inform the parents of the full array of risks; apparently they warned that it might cause sexual dysfunction, and then downplayed this concern because the kid hasn't really started puberty yet; the parents report that after looking into it more fully, one of the side effects to prolonged use is brain damage.
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