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."
Read more: Meds, lack of oversight put emphasis on survival - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/fostercare/ci_25573544/meds-lack-oversight-put-emphasis-survival#ixzz2zUbEH1V8
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