Looking back, Pam Herrera wishes she had asked more questions and been more forceful with her son’s therapists.
The list of medications her son took ages 4-16 is staggering: multiple antipsychotics, antidepressants and stimulants, sometimes five at a time, each at the maximum dose allowed. He was so medicated, Herrera said, “we disintegrated his ability to learn.”
The Herreras, foster parents to more than 100 children over the past 18 years, first met Anthony when he was 15 months old. He was so neglected and malnourished that he could not sit up or eat solid food.
They adopted him in 1998, when he was 3, and for the next several years struggled to control behavior so violent and out of control that it took over their lives.
At his worst, the little boy would scream that he was going to kill his mother, thrash and kick and bite, and throw furniture. Once, at Elitch Gardens amusement park, he flew into a rage because he didn’t win a stuffed animal and jumped on his mother’s back, trying to strangle her and rip off her clothes.
When he wasn’t having a violent tantrum, he was one of the sweetest children in her life, hugging his mother and telling her how much he loved her. Anthony usually didn’t even remember the raging fits once they ended.
The boy was diagnosed as bipolar at age 5 and put on the antipsychotic Zyprexa, as well as Tenex and Adderall for hyperactivity. At age 8, his doctor added another antipsychotic, Abilify. Each time that the medications were changed, they would calm him down for a few weeks, but then the rages would begin again, often worse than before.
By the time he was a teen, Anthony was on five medications at once.
His grandparents told Herrera, “He looks like a zombie.”
” ‘Are we masking something because we are medicating him so much?’ ” his mother would ask Anthony’s doctors. “At the time, I didn’t know any better. I was doing what the doctor told me to do. The rages were so bad when he was on medication, I couldn’t imagine what they would be like if he wasn’t on medication.”
Herrera said she often cared for foster teens who took antipsychotics and antidepressants in her early years as a foster parent but saw less when she began to specialize in young children with medical issues.
In 2011, when Anthony was 16, he suffered what looked like a stroke — drooling and constricted, drawn-up arms — but was diagnosed as an overdose of Abilify caused by a buildup of drugs in his system that his body had stopped processing. He spent a week at Children’s Hospital in Aurora, where he was diagnosed as autistic with a pervasive developmental disability, plus post-traumatic stress disorder.
His mother was told Anthony wasn’t bipolar after all and had been medicated for the wrong issues. He stopped all medication.
After years on mind-altering drugs, Anthony had fallen far behind in school. At 16, he had the developmental function of a 9-year-old. He read at a sixth-grade level and wrote like a kindergartner.
Three years off medication, he is now 19 with the functioning ability of a 16-year-old.
Anthony still has rages, but only once or twice a year, and his mother is able to connect with him and tell him to stop, unlike the years when he would disassociate completely during a tantrum.
“I wonder if some of the medication wasn’t inducing the rages,” said Herrera, who doesn’t blame the foster-care system but, rather, the medical and pharmaceutical communities for what she now considers serious overmedication of her son.
“Now, I would want to say to the therapist, ‘Why do we need so many medications?’ ” she said. “His brain was so clouded that I don’t think he was able to learn the way he should have been.”
About the series
This investigation by The Denver Post into psychotropic drug use by foster children stems from The Post’s “Failed to Death” series on Colorado’s child-welfare system that ran in 2012.
The overprescription of powerful psychotropic medication to foster children is a national epidemic — yet in Colorado, efforts to curb the problem lag some states.
The Post obtained unpublished state data and reports, interviewed foster families and children, reviewed other states’ efforts and examined promising new therapies.
Sunday: Foster kids are prescribed powerful drugs that alter brain function at rates far higher than other children. A growing number of experts say this is not only unnecessary, but harmful.
Monday: Over decades, the pharmaceutical industry pushed aggressively to market psychotropics to children and tap into the lucrative Medicaid system.
Tuesday: New therapies to repair developmental delays in children’s brains caused by abuse and neglect are taking hold. Proponents advocate for more therapy and fewer medications.
Wednesday: Other states have been more aggressive and more effective than Colorado in establishing policies to reduce prescriptions of psychotropics to foster children.
