Antipsychotic Children

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The number of children taking powerful antipsychotic drugs has nearly tripled over the last 10 to 15 years, according to recent research. The increase comes not because of an epidemic of schizophrenia or other forms of serious mental illness in children, but because doctors are increasingly prescribing the drugs to treat behavior problems, a use not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). And a disproportionate number of those prescriptions are written for poor and minority children, some as young as age 2.

Doctors are prescribing antipsychotics even though there’s minimal evidence that the drugs help kids for approved uses, much less the unapproved ones, such as behavioral problems. And to make matters worse, the little research …show more content…
(See the table below for a summary)But the majority of kids prescribed antipsychotic drugs don’t take them for one of those reasons. Schizophrenia is rarely diagnosed until adulthood, for example. Bipolar disorder is estimated to affect less than 3 percent of teens, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, but the exact prevalence is unknown because of its difficulty to diagnose in children. That’s partly because the symptoms are less clear and may overlap with other conditions such as ADHD. And while about one in 110 children have some form of autistic disorder, only about 30 percent are affected by the aggressive impulse behavior antipsychotic drugs have been approved to treat. Over the last decade or so, doctors have increasingly prescribed the drugs for “off-label” uses, particularly in ADHD and disruptive behavior disorder, a broad diagnosis that encompasses a range of behaviors from attacking other children to temper tantrums and defying authority.Increasingly, kids are prescribed antipsychotic medications at their pediatrician’s office, rather than by a psychiatrist. The number of prescriptions for the drugs written by pediatricians has increased steadily over the last several years and is up nearly 25 percent since …show more content…
In the first, researchers looked at prescribing practices from 2005 to 2009 and those of a decade earlier. Results, published online Aug. 6, 2012, by the Archives of General Psychiatry showed that antipsychotic use increased about 85 percent in children and adolescents—at a much higher rate than in adults—and that the drugs are now used very differently in younger patients. For example, in adults, doctors prescribe antipsychotic drugs mostly for bipolar disorder, depression, or schizophrenia and more often to women; in children and adolescents, the drugs are most commonly prescribed to treat disruptive behavior disorder in boys.Another analysis found that antipsychotic prescriptions for children age 2 to 5 doubled between 2001 and 2007. Most of the children were 4- and 5-year-old boys, with ADHD and disruptive behavior disorder among the most frequent
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