Tamisha Macklin’s therapists always wanted to talk about her behavior: Did she smoke pot this week? Did she ditch school?
Her therapy, she says, barely scratched the surface of her pain. They didn’t ask much about the night she was taken from her father at 6 years old and dropped off at a foster home, where she cried for days and hardly spoke. Or the time she was arrested for selling drugs for a boy who was lying when he said he loved her. Or the weeks she spent on the run from foster care before deciding to turn herself in, even though it meant a two-year term in youth corrections.
“I was really sad and broken,” said Macklin, now 25 and a leader at Youth Voice, which mentors young people in the foster system.
Instead of therapy, Macklin said she was given psychotropic medications. Lots of them. “Zoloft, Zyprexa, Trazodone, a lot of stuff I couldn’t even pronounce,” she said. “I was depressed. I hated my life. I didn’t really even want to live. I didn’t care.”
The reasons for her diagnosis of manic depression seemed obvious to her. “Of course I am going to be sad. I never felt like I belonged anywhere,” Macklin said. “Anyone would be depressed if your parents weren’t there to raise you.”
As a little girl, Macklin was physically abused by her father, who had a drug addiction and would disappear for days. She spent much of her time with the family across the street from her dad’s house in Aurora. But one night when her father didn’t return, the family called child welfare authorities. The police came and checked her for bruises. A caseworker took her into emergency foster care.
The foster home was full of kids. Macklin’s memories are vague, but she recalls they spoke Spanish and held a church service that she couldn’t understand in their basement. It all felt strange.
For the next few years, she bounced through foster homes, or in “kinship care,” sleeping on her grandmother’s couch. For a while, in middle school, she went back to her dad and was often alone, again. She hung out with older kids and started accumulating a juvenile record that included theft and trespassing.
Macklin wishes someone would have rescued her then. But her juvenile crimes did not trigger the child welfare department to follow up on her case, she said.
“No one really came to check on me,” she said.
At 14, she was busted for selling drugs, for her older boyfriend, to an undercover officer. When the police came, her boyfriend told them he did not know her.
Macklin returned to foster care, switching schools again. She ran away and was homeless on her 17th birthday, what she calls her rock bottom. Soon after, she turned herself in on probation violations and was sent to the Colorado Division of Youth Corrections.
Macklin was determined then to wean herself off the medications she had been taking for years. She knew she would leave the corrections system as an adult and feared she couldn’t afford them on her own. Also, she said, the drugs made her “feel crazier.”
“That was the safest I ever felt,” she said. “I was protected there. It was safe to recognize my feelings and emotions.”
Macklin names two things that helped her quit her medications: taking up running and a woman who ministered in the youth corrections system and became her mentor. “I could call her and talk to her about anything. That made the difference for me,” said Macklin, who, eight years later, still visits the woman and her family.
Macklin is making it on her own now, managing a studio apartment, taking classes at the Community College of Denver and working as a community outreach coordinator for a nonprofit.
When her paycheck doesn’t stretch to the end of the month, she visits a food bank or eats only one meal a day. She avoids all medication.
“I don’t even like taking Tylenol,” she said.
About the drugs
Psychotropics: A broad class of medications made of chemicals that alter brain function, including mood and behavior; these include antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs and attention-deficit-disorder drugs.
Antipsychotics: The most powerful drugs in the broader class of psychotropics; have been linked to diabetes and weight gain in children, and growth of breasts in boys.
Atypicals: The latest generation of antipsychotic medications, with brand names such as Abilify, Zyprexa and Risperdal.
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.
