They come into the home without warning. They take the child without mercy. And then, in far too many cases, they drug the pain instead of treating the wound. This is what happens behind closed doors after a child is removed from their family. Long after the flashing lights are gone. After the door slams. After the crying stops. There is another kind of silence that settles in. One that is not the result of healing, but of sedation.
Across Alabama and across this country, children are not just being taken. They are being chemically controlled.
Within days of entering foster care or state custody, many children are prescribed medications they never needed at home. They are evaluated in rushed sessions by unfamiliar professionals. Diagnosed based on behaviors they have never displayed before. Behaviors that, if anyone stopped to listen, would sound a lot like trauma. Like grief. Like fear. But in this system, emotions are not processed. They are pathologized. And pain is treated like a disease.
A crying child is labeled anxious. A scared child is labeled defiant. A restless child is labeled hyperactive. The answer is a pill. Or two. Or five.
One mother said she fought to regain custody of her daughter, only to find out the child had been placed on multiple medications while in care. Medications the mother was never consulted about. Her daughter, once vibrant and strong-willed, returned home quiet, foggy, unsure of herself. “She was still my baby,” the mother said. “But it felt like they had put a screen between us. Like she could not feel the world the same anymore.”
Another child who aged out of care admitted, “I did not know what I was taking. I just took what they gave me. I stopped having nightmares, but I also stopped dreaming.”
As I write this article to shed light, I do so with the weight of my own story pressing against every word. I know what it means to live behind the walls of the child welfare system. I know what it means to be confined not just physically but emotionally. Drugged. Silenced. Told it was for my own good.
I was a child caught in the crosshairs of a system that never saw me clearly. I was snatched from my home without just cause. Stripped from the very love, care, and safety of my mother. And before I had the chance to understand what was happening, I was being given pills. No one asked me what I needed. No one explained what they were putting in my body. They called it treatment. It was far from treatment. It was literal confinement. Imprisonment. Forcing me to live lifeless inside of a living, breathing body.
They did not want me to feel. They did not want me to question their irresponsible decisions. They did not want me to say I wanted my mother or that I wanted to go home. They wanted me to accept whatever they thought was “best” for me without resistance.
I remember the feeling of being tired all the time. Of losing track of what day it was. Of forgetting what it felt like to laugh without it catching in my throat. I was not a danger to anyone. I was a child grieving the loss of my mother. I was grieving the loss of a mother who was still alive. And they called that a disorder. This is not just poor mental health care. This is systemic abuse dressed in clinical terms. A silent war on children’s minds.
Psychotropic medications are being used as behavioral tools, not healing instruments. Children are being drugged not because they are ill, but because they are inconvenient. Because sedation is cheaper than trauma therapy. Because foster parents are overwhelmed. Because silence is easier to manage than sorrow. No child should be given an antipsychotic because they miss their mother. No teenager should be placed on mood stabilizers because they cried in court. No six-year-old should be chemically sedated because the group home cannot handle him running through the hallway.
But that is what is happening.
And parents? They are kept in the dark. Cut out of medical decisions. Denied access to their child’s records. Treated as a threat instead of the expert on their own child’s needs. Once your child is in custody, the state becomes the parent. And the state does not always choose care. It chooses control.
Why are we not talking about this?
Why are the same agencies that claim to protect children signing off on prescriptions that rob them of their voice, their energy, their ability to even feel what has happened to them?
Because if the child goes quiet, the system looks stable. If the tears stop, the paperwork gets easier. If the case looks compliant, nobody asks what it cost. We are medicating children into compliance. Into confusion. Into forgetting. And the public lets it happen because we are told it is therapeutic. It is not. This is chemical restraint. This is psychiatric silencing. This is how a child becomes a case number and a pill bottle instead of a soul in need of restoration.
But let’s ask the question out loud.
How is this justifiable?
How is it morally or legally acceptable to drug a child into silence after tearing them from their home?
How are our very own children being experimented on as if they were lab mice while the system signs off and calls it care?
When the state begins to weaponize medication to manage children they should have never taken in the first place, the system is no longer broken, it is downright dangerous.
If your child was medicated without your consent, speak up.
If you are a former foster youth who was drugged for your behavior, your story matters.
If you are a parent who sat in court while your child stared blankly through you, you are not alone.
If you are a teacher, a nurse, a social worker, ask harder questions. Do not let silence be mistaken for peace.
We must demand that no child be medicated as a shortcut. We must demand full transparency for all psychotropic use in foster care. We must demand trauma-informed care that centers families, not compliance.
This is not just a policy failure. It is a human rights crisis.
And if we do not speak, the silence will grow. One pill. One file. One child at a time.
