08/06/2026
🚨 Florida’s Surgeon General is now warning doctors against giving psychiatric drugs to children, and the implications should concern every parent in the country.
Dr. Joseph Ladapo and the Florida Department of Health have issued formal guidance urging physicians to avoid prescribing these medications for depression, anxiety, ADHD, and related conditions in patients as young as five.
National data reveals that nearly 15% of children ages 5 to 17 received mental health treatment in the past year, with 8% of them placed on medication.
Millions of developing brains are therefore being exposed to psychiatric drugs that frequently lack full FDA approval for pediatric use and whose long-term effects remain poorly understood.
Especially alarming is how often these prescriptions are written before clinicians thoroughly investigate the underlying causes of a child’s distress.
Limited time for play, chronic sleep problems, constant screen exposure, and a school system that demands prolonged stillness and quiet compliance receive far too little scrutiny.
Rather than correcting the conditions that leave young people restless, anxious, and overwhelmed, the default response has become medication so they can endure another day of enforced inactivity.
Ladapo’s recommendations are clear.
Providers should conduct comprehensive evaluations that include full physical assessments.
They should prioritize psychotherapy and evidence-based behavior management.
And when clinically appropriate, they should pursue deprescribing.
This position does not reject the responsible use of medicine.
It challenges the routine overmedication of a generation never designed to suppress its natural energy inside fluorescent classrooms for most of the day.
Children are not defective.
The expectations placed upon them have become unreasonable.
The urgent question is whether we will continue medicating childhood or finally choose to protect it.
