The use of anti-psychotic drugs among America’s children increased more than fivefold from 1993 to 2002, according to a study published June 5 in Archives of General Psychiatry.
Researchers found that anti-psychotic medications were prescribed to 1,438 per 100,000 children and adolescents in 2002, compared to 275 per 100,000 in the two-year period from 1993 to 1995.
“We are using these medications and don’t know how they work, if they work, or at what cost,” said Dr. John March, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University and chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.
“It amounts to a huge experiment with the lives of American kids, and what it tells us is that we’ve got to do something other than we’re doing now.”
Doctors are allowed to prescribe any medication that has been approved for use by humans, and they do even though none of the most commonly prescribed anti-psychotics is approved for use in children.
Few studies on the subject have been conducted, and Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University in New York and the lead author of the latest study, said, “To me the most striking thing was that nearly one in five psychiatric visits for young people included a prescription for anti-psychotics.”
The study concluded that more than 40 percent of the children who received anti-psychotics were also taking at least one other psychiatric medication. (BP)
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