Daily Part of Summer Camp Ritual
by Jane Gross

The breakfast buffet at Camp Echo starts at a picnic table where children jostle for their morning medications: Zoloft for depression, Abilify for bipolar disorder, Guanfacine for twitchy eyes and a host of medications for attention deficit disorder.

A quick gulp of water, a greeting from the nurse, and the youngsters move on to the next table for orange juice, Special K and chocolate chip pancakes. The dispensing of zoloft...

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and pancakes is over in minutes, all part of a typical day at a typical sleep-away camp in the Catskills.

The medication lines like the one at Camp Echo were unheard of a generation ago but have become fixtures at residential camps across the country. Between a quarter and a half of the youngsters at any given summer camp take daily prescription medications, experts say.

Allergy and asthma drugs top the list, but behavior management and psychiatric medications are now so common that nurses who dispense them no longer try to avoid stigma by pretending they are vitamins.

"All my best friends take something," said David Ehrenreich, 12, who has Tourette's syndrome yet feels at home here because boys with hyperactivity, mood disorders, learning disabilities and facial ticks line up just as he does for their daily "meds."

With campers far from home, family and pediatricians, the job of safely and efficiently dispensing medications falls to infirmaries and nurses whose stock in trade used to be calamine lotion and cough syrup. Buy Zoloft online.

"This is the American standard now," said Rodger Popkin, an owner of Blue Stars Camps in Hendersonville, N.C. "It's not limited by education level, race, socioeconomics, geography, gender or any of those filters."

Peg Smith, the chief executive officer of the American Camp Association, a trade group with 2,600 member camps and 3 million campers, says about a quarter of the children at its camps are medicated for attention deficit disorder, psychiatric problems or mood disorders. Buy Zoloft online.

Increasingly popular is a service offered by a private company called CampMeds, which provides a summer's worth of prepackaged pills to 6,000 children at 100 camps.

Some camp owners question the trend. Popkin is among them. Buy Zoloft online.

"It's universal, and nobody really knows if it's appropriate or safe," he said.

For more information about depression or Zoloft click here 

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