Are antidepressants endangering our children?
Q.Antidepressants for school phobias, anti-psychotics for children who refuse to obey the rules. A generation ago, parents worried about giving their children too much Baby Aspirin. Today, psychiatric drugs rank among the top five medicines prescribed to Canadian children and teens.
A.Today, the use of SSRI antidepressants in children is soaring. But just how many children truly need the drugs is murky. "The fact that 20 per cent of young people are being diagnosed with a major psychiatric illness (depression) that does not respond to conventional treatment (antidepressants) and the placebo response is so great begs the question, are we misdiagnosing this group of patients?" one doctor wrote in a recent electronic letter to the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Meanwhile, some parents of mentally ill children see a bitter irony. While healthy children may be getting drugs, parents of children so sick they think Walt Disney cartoon characters are real struggle for years to get doctors to take their concerns seriously so they can get the appropriate treatment. But as the furor over the use of antidepressants in children and teens builds, some parents worry any move to ban their use in kids in Canada will only make a bad situation worse. In a 1999 survey of nearly 600 U.S. family doctors and pediatricians, 72 per cent reported prescribing an SSRI for a patient younger than 18 years of age. (None of the drugs has been licensed for u se in children in Canada.) Just eight per cent of the doctors surveyed said they had adequate training in the management of childhood depression, and 16 per cent "reported feeling uncomfortable" with the care of depressed children. Nearly three-quarters had written an SSRI prescription for children and teens with mild to moderate depression, while more than half had ordered an SSRI for another diagnosis, including attention deficit disorder, aggression disorder and even bed-wetting.
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