A Triumph for Florida’s Children! Surgeon General Ladapo’s Guidance Against Psychiatric Drugs

For more than half a century, I have warned that psychiatric drugs are brain-disabling agents that do far more harm than good, especially to the developing brains of children. In books such as Toxic Psychiatry, Talking Back to Ritalin, The Ritalin Fact Book, Reclaiming Our Children, Medication Madness, Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, and Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal, and in peer-reviewed papers including my 2014 article in Children & Society on the rights of children and parents, I have documented the neurotoxicity of stimulants, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and other psychotropics. I have called for a prohibition (here and here and here) on giving these drugs to children.

On July 24, 2026, Florida’s Department of Health, under State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, issued a guidance statement that comes closer to that scientific and moral imperative than any official American policy I have seen. Titled “Avoidance of Psychotropic Pharmacotherapy in Children age 5-17,” the document cautions healthcare providers against prescribing psychotropic medications to children for depression, anxiety, attention-deficit related disorders, and behavioral problems. It prioritizes comprehensive evaluations, psychotherapy, parental training in evidence-based behavior management, physical activity, dietary improvement, reduced screen time, and careful deprescribing.

This is not a vague suggestion. It is a clear recommendation against the routine use of these drugs. Dr. Ladapo and the Florida Department of Health have taken a courageous stand against the psychopharmaceutical complex that has been drugging America’s children for decades. I applaud them without reservation.

The Scientific Reality of Psychiatric Drugs in Children

Psychiatric drugs do not correct chemical imbalances. No such imbalances have ever been proven. These agents are neurotoxins: They sicken the neurons of the brain that are responsible for neurotransmission and sometimes kill them. In doing this, their major effect is to disrupt normal brain function, thereby suppressing spontaneous behavior, blunting emotion, and, over time, producing long-lasting harm.

Stimulants such as methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta) and amphetamines (Adderall, Dexedrine) produce a continuum of central nervous system toxicity. They increase energy and hyper-alertness while promoting obsessive, rote behavior and suppressing curiosity, playfulness, and social engagement. The so-called “therapeutic effect” is toxicity itself—children become more docile and easier to manage in rigid environments. Animal and human studies show these drugs inhibit growth, reduce blood flow to the brain, disrupt multiple neurotransmitter systems, and can cause irreversible cerebral dysfunction. Long-term follow-up of boys diagnosed with mild hyperactivity and treated with stimulants in childhood reveals higher rates of early death, brain atrophy, suicide, psychiatric hospitalization, incarceration, drug addiction, and reduced quality of life.

Stimulants and antidepressants often serve as a gateway to additional psychiatric drugs. Both types of drugs can cause adverse effects that doctors feel the necessity of controlling with additional psychiatric drugs. This can result in a dangerous poly drug therapy where the prescribing physician cannot easily determine if the child is getting worse because of a particular drug or because of some combinations of the drugs, or because of the whole poly drug scheme. The result can be a gradual but ultimately disastrous decline in the child’s well-being, which is never attributed to medication but can virtually ruin the child’s future.

Antidepressants, especially the SSRIs, carry FDA black-box warnings for increased suicidality in children and young adults. They commonly produce activation, agitation, emotional blunting, mania, and behavioral disinhibition. In short-term trials, the rate of suicidal thinking or behavior roughly doubles. The harmful mental and behavioral effects are especially severe in the young. Many “bad” or “antisocial” behaviors in medicated children are in reality driven by the drugs themselves. I frequently see people who have been diagnosed bipolar for many years, but who had no such symptoms before being put on psychiatric drugs. Especially antidepressants, with their stimulating effects, can cause bipolar drug-induced behavior that lands them in mental hospitals. This ‘bipolar effect’ occurs in both adults and in children.

Antipsychotics (neuroleptics) such as risperidone, aripiprazole, quetiapine, and olanzapine function as chemical lobotomies. They produce apathy, emotional indifference, and neurological damage including tardive dyskinesia. Antipsychotic drugs and antidepressants can also have a paradoxical effect of causing severe increased agitation that is called akathisia or the inability to stop moving. Children and adults with akathisia are often misdiagnosed with psychiatric diagnoses such as anxiety and bipolar disorder. The use of antipsychotics and antidepressants in children has exploded under the expanded diagnosis of “bipolar disorder,” a label that was almost never applied to children when I trained.

None of these drugs has been shown to improve long-term outcomes. They interfere with the normal maturation of the still-growing brain. Children cannot give meaningful informed consent. Parents are rarely told the full truth about risks, alternatives, or the absence of proven long-term benefit.

My 2014 paper in Children & Society concluded that we should work toward a prohibition against giving psychiatric drugs to children and instead focus on safe and effective ways of meeting children’s needs within their families, schools, and society. Florida’s guidance moves us in that direction.

What Florida Has Done Right

The Florida guidance correctly notes that many children never receive thorough evaluations of environmental stressors or behavioral therapy before drugs are started. It insists on comprehensive assessment—health history, psychosocial evaluation, mental status examination, physical examination, and laboratory testing for nutritional, endocrine, and other medical conditions—before any medication is considered, except in true emergencies.

It recommends beginning with psychotherapy for mild presentations. It urges parents to receive training in evidence-based behavior management that includes regular physical activity, reduction of processed foods, sugar, and artificial ingredients, and substantial reduction of screen time. These are precisely the environmental and lifestyle factors that influence children’s emotional and behavioral well-being far more than any alleged chemical imbalance.

Finally, it addresses deprescribing: medications should not be stopped abruptly, and the cumulative risks of polypharmacy must be considered. This is essential. Abrupt withdrawal from psychiatric drugs can produce severe rebound and withdrawal syndromes that are often misdiagnosed as “relapse” of the original “disorder.”

The guidance is not a legal ban. It is a strong caution that medications should never substitute for individual therapy and psychosocial care. Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Shevaun Harris has rightly stated that psychotropic medications can play a role only when clinically appropriate and medically necessary. In the overwhelming majority of cases involving children, they are neither.

The Larger Context

For decades, the psychiatric establishment and the drug companies have medicalized normal childhood energy, sadness, anxiety, and rebellion. The result has been millions of children whose brains have been chemically altered during critical developmental periods. The Florida guidance challenges that paradigm. It insists that we look first at the child’s life circumstances, family dynamics, sleep, diet, physical activity, and screen exposure.

This is not anti-science. It is science-based medicine that refuses to ignore the evidence of harm. It is also morally necessary. Children are the most vulnerable members of society. They cannot protect themselves from the brain-disabling treatments that adults impose upon them.

The Florida guidance aligns with the broader “Make America Healthy Again”-style emphasis on non-pharmacological approaches that is being directed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

How Does This Apply to Therapy for Children

“When working with children in private practice, I recommend a family therapy approach. I do not tend to see the child alone but instead involve parents, grandparents, and other significant adults as much as possible. It is often possible in one session to see communication improve between the child and the adults in a way that is more respectful and loving with rather rapid improvements in how the child is feeling and conducting him or herself. I find that children more readily grasp their own responsibility for controlling their behavior in a session in which I am also addressing the necessity of their parents controlling how they relate to their children.

Therapy becomes a mutual learning experience for parent and child with the specific goal of developing more respectful, caring, and unconditionally loving within the family. Parents often need coaching in how to maintain a respectful and loving attitude when in conflict with their children, for example, in setting limits and boundaries on their behavior. Parents and children need to be reminded that they can learn to develop better ways of relating to each other and that they must not let diagnoses or the previous prescription of drugs make the children feel like they have no control of their own minds and behavior. Diagnosing and prescribing drugs often make adults feel more like helpless children who cannot control themselves. Imagine how much more harmful these effects are for children who are struggling with learning personal sovereignty and responsibility.

I discuss these issues with children directly as long as they are old enough to have a conversation about these issues and seem to be benefiting. If I do see a child alone, I remind them that they are of course very sensitive to what goes on around them at home and at school, and that while that is normal, it is important for them to learn to think and feel and to conduct themselves in ways that improve their own personal success and well-being.

I also remind both parents and children that their environments are so important that they need to discuss in more detail how they feel about them and that their parents may have more opportunities to help them through taking actions the child hadn’t thought possible such as change of teachers, a change of schools, or homeschooling.

–Peter R. Breggin, MD

A Call to Parents, Physicians, and Other States

Parents: You have the right and the responsibility to protect your children from unnecessary psychiatric drugs. Demand thorough evaluations. Insist on therapy and environmental interventions first. Question any doctor who reaches for a prescription pad before exploring the real sources of your child’s distress. If your child (or you) are on psychiatric drugs, remember they are not only dangerous to take, they are also dangerous to withdraw from. Withdrawal from psychiatric drugs should be done cautiously with professional supervision. Please see the book by Peter R. Breggin, MD, Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and their Families. Many parents find that they are more able to relate lovingly and rationally to their children when they themselves have safely tapered off psychiatric drugs.

Physicians: The Florida guidance gives you official cover to practice more carefully and humanely. Use it. Refuse to become agents of the psychopharmaceutical complex.

Other states: Follow Florida’s lead. Issue similar guidance. Protect the developing brains of the next generation.

Dr. Joseph Ladapo and the Florida Department of Health have performed a public service of historic importance. They have affirmed what the scientific evidence and clinical experience have long shown: psychiatric drugs are not the answer for the vast majority of children struggling with emotional or behavioral difficulties. Love, attention, structure, physical health, and genuine human relationships are.

The war against the chemical assault on our children’s minds has gained a powerful new ally. Let us seize this moment and reclaim our children.

Dr. Peter R. Breggin is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, NY.

The Weaponization of Psychiatry

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December 3, 2022

Psychiatry has been the enforcer of choice used by strong-arm governments for as long as it has existed. After all, psychiatry is the perfect cover to make targeted individuals do what government wants. If psychiatry is targeting a person it can be considered a private medical matter— not a matter of the State or a police action.