Topical Teaching

Anyone else get the feeling that psychiatrists are prescribing ADHD drugs far too carelessly?

Antipsychotic drugs are prescribed during almost one in three of all visits kids and teens make to psychiatrists in the United States, according to a new study, up from about one in eleven during the 1990s.

Much of that increase, researchers say, is from doctors prescribing the drugs for disruptive behaviors, such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). There are, however, no antipsychotics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat those disorders in kids.

“They’re approved for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and irritability with autism. None of them are approved for use with ADHD,” said Dr. Mark Olfson, the study’s lead author and a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University in New York.

Olfson and his colleagues, who published their work Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found that for kids and teens, roughly 90 percent of the antipsychotic prescriptions written during office visits between 2005 and 2009 were “off label,” which means the drugs are being prescribed for something other than for what they’re approved.

Click here to read my post, Who Needs Quality Teaching or Parenting When You Have Medications?

Click here to read my post, Get Your Kids on Ritalin Before Their Grades Suffer

Click here to read my post, It is Doctors Not Teachers Who Are Helping Children Get Good Grades

Click here to read my post, Doctors Create a New Normal by Over-Prescribing Drugs

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