Review rules on meds for foster kids

By Mary Margaret Oliver

Tommy made good grades in the first grade, and his teacher said he was a big help and a delight to have in the classroom. Soon after this report card was sent home, Tommy’s toddler sister drowned in the bathtub while Tommy was watching her and his other siblings. Tommy’s parents were arrested, the surviving children entered foster care and Tommy’s early successes and hopes for the future began to fade.

Today, Tommy is 13, living in an expensive restrictive institution and on multiple psychotropic drugs for his behavior, some of which are not Federal Drug and Administration approved for use by children. These drugs come with side-effects like involuntary jerking motions and fatigue, hard for any teenager. His parents are now out of prison but have left Georgia and taken Tommy’s sibling with them. No adult outside of government caseworkers and its contractors are connected to Tommy. He has few visitors. And yet, Tommy is still making good grades, and he hopes to be placed in a loving home with real parents soon.

Tommy is a real child, although Tommy is not his real name, and his story is one case reviewed during Georgia’s Cold Case Project, a project sponsored by the Supreme Court of Georgia’s Committee on Justice for Children charged with improving the legal process for children in the courts as result of abuse and neglect.

With federal Court Improvement Project funding, the committee, chaired by Justice Harris Hines, and in full partnership with the Division of Families and Children Services, first identified children who have lingered in foster care for many years, with multiple placements, and no connection to their original family.

The committee hired attorneys to work as “Fellows” to the Supreme Court, reviewed in detail 214 cases, and with a specialized research firm have made recommendations for improvement for both for these particular children and the system. The full report on the yearlong Cold Case Project is available at www.georgiacourts.gov.

One of the 15 recommendations from the Cold Case Project’s report is for Georgia to provide independent oversight of mental health treatment, specifically that children’s medications be routinely reviewed by an independent psychiatrist. Case reviews have detailed tragic consequences of prescribing multiple psychotropic drugs, and this issue has received national attention, based both on what is adequate medical care and the costs.

Children as young as 12 in the review were observed to be on more than four psychotropic drugs simultaneously. Research is clear that over medication can result in negative symptoms, can be used for discipline or control issues, and is particularly a problem for children in foster care where there is no loving family member who advocates for, or is connected to, the child and to his or her future.

I pre-filed HB 23 this week, which requires DFCS to implement rules creating a process for independent medical review of mental health treatment programs for foster care children. While Georgia’s child welfare system has much improved during the past 10 years, there are still specific, complex problems that must be addressed and not merely endured. The most vulnerable children in our state’s foster care system deserve nothing less, and specifically Tommy deserves a home.

Who should decide and oversee psychotropic medications for children in foster care where there is no loving or competent parent? This is an important question for Tommy and hundreds of other children, and they deserve our response.

State Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, a Democrat, represents a portion of middle DeKalb County in the Legislature.