Informed Consent

Adverse Effects of drugs, "All drugs have side effects" but we never expected them to be so damaging. We were so stupid not to ask. The problem was that in our minds was that these drugs were presented as "medications" and were given by doctors, and doctors supposed to help you heal... feel better. Even if we ask what to expect the doctor would have made it sound as something of not importance and remote to happen, said, I believe, absolutely intentionally, so we parents consent. Danny was a child, just 11 years old, what were these people thinking? Angrily, we asked ourselves.What do they care about? Prescribing these neurotoxic drugs to a child. We felt betrayed.
We were expecting words of wisdom product of their highly educated background, of their higher intelligence and many years experience. We thought of them kind and understanding and, falsely, they looked the part. We were expecting to light the way to lift our burden instead they brought misery to an already anguished family. They brought pain and suffering to an innocent child, a trusting child, a defenseless, non-verbal autistic child, and they did intentionally with full knowledge of what they were intended to do, prescribing drugs that would bring chaos and confusion to us and to him, reducing his potential to nothing.

Adverse effects were never mentioned to us. We heard someone saying they did, they lied. Much later we read the words, hard to pronounce, even if the doctor would have said those words we wouldn’t have understood them. So the doctor slept through our first appointment to wake up to write the prescription for Thorazine. Years later we read the words describing the adverse effects, we needed a medical dictionary to see their meaning of each and from there to search online for simpler explanations. If they were mentioned and spelled them out to us we have never consented. If they had explained what was the real purpose of their use we have never consented.
That’s what was lacking: "informed consent" and we were not duly informed of their intentions and consequences of using these psychiatric drugs on a bright non-verbal autistic child. Years later the deception continued, when we saw the damage and we opposed to the use of drugs, threats and false allegations were made to get us to consent.
So the government has formed a committee to educate front-line workers to identify drugs’s adverse effects on state-care children. I noticed doctors are not able to identify correctly the damaging effects, not able to separate "conditions’s behaviours" from drug-induced behaviours. If doctors don’t see them less would be able to see an average caregiver. I have noticed that. And then I have seen the indifference, the non-response. Some of Danny’s caring caregivers sounded the alarm to no reaction neither from us, nor from the doctor or from the group home administration. So, with committee or not, I don’t believe that situation is going to improve unless parents get educated or better, the government creates a drug-free environment for children and non-verbal autistic