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Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics By DUFF WILSON Published: December 11, 2009: NY Times New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows. Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them ? but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children? The questions go beyond the psychological impact on Medicaid children, serious as that may be...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on December 13, 2009 (boomark / email).