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Antipsychotics Too Often Prescribed For Aggression In Children [NPR.org]

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Powerful antipsychotic medications are being used to treat children and teenagers with ADHD, aggression and behavior problems, a study finds, even though safer treatments are available and should be used first.

"There's been concern that these medications have been overused, particularly in young children," says Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who led thestudy. It was published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry. "Guidelines and clinical wisdom suggest that you really should be using a high degree of caution and only using them when other treatments have failed, as a last resort."

Olfson and his colleagues looked at prescription data from about 60 percent of the retail pharmacies in the United States in 2006, 2008 and 2010. That included almost 852,000 children, teenagers and young adults. Teens were most likely to be prescribed antipsychotics, with 1.19 percent getting the drugs in 2010, compared to 0.11 percent in younger children. Boys were more likely to be given the medications.

 

[For more of this story, written by Nancy Shute, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...gression-in-children]

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1. They are very dangerous drugs with incredibly dangerous side effects.
2. They don't address the cause of the problem "what is going on in this child's life that he/she is aggressive?"
3. They can lead society and the child to believe they are "bad" and have a problem which changes how the rest of us view the child and how he/she  views the self. I for one don't want to increase the chances of a child developing low self-esteem especially they are already coming from a traumatic and shaming environment.
4. These drugs  have proven to solve nothing in the long term and the kids go down this path --- ADHD ---> Oppositional Defiant -----> Conduct Disorder -----> Prison or less severe school failure and drug addiction. Did the pediatrician ever seriously help  the child?
Last edited by Former Member

Prescriptions are easier to write, than having to take the time to make eye contact, ask a person: "What happened to You?", and take additional time to listen to their response, as scheduling staff may remind physicians they have patients with appointments awaiting them. Older physicians, in this era of electronic medical records, may not type as fast on their laptops, or i-pads, as younger physicians may be apt to. A time and motion study might afford us additional relevant detail, as would medicare/medicaid data about which physician writes how many prescriptions per day for which drug. ProPublica tracks some of that. So does Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, and the senate committee he chairs overseeing medicaid/medicare prescriptions. 

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