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Informed Consent And The Psychiatric Drugging Of Children

Fred Baughman, Jr., M.D.

The legal doctrine of informed consent requires a physician to disclose sufficient information for a patient to make an informed decision about a proposed treatment. True consent is the informed exercise of choice and requires an opportunity to evaluate knowledgeably the options available and the risks attendant on each. In the case of children, this doctrine must be interpreted to mean that parents have a legal right to sufficient information necessary to make a fully informed choice on behalf of their children. This article examines the issue of informed consent in the psychiatric drugging of school-age children in the United States, where millions of parents have agreed to the recommendation that their children take psychiatric drugs. The authors argue that informed consent is systematically violated in this domain and present a look at what authentic informed consent for parents to decide about psychiatric drugs for their children would entail.

Key Words: informed consent • Ritalin • ADHD • parental rights • psychiatric drugs • children

Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 43, No. 2, 50-64 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0022167802250728


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