Miscellaneous

Florida Mulls Lawsuit Over Antipsychotic Programs

By Walter Olson, Ted Frank, and David Nieporent

That's the title of a post by Ed Silverman over at Pharalot. The issue is the use if atypical antipsychotics in children:

Florida Medicaid records show the number of children - some just months old - who were prescribed the drugs went from 9,364 seven years ago to 18,137 in 2006. No records for privately insured patients are available.

As I mentioned earlier this week, putting the blame on the pharmaceutical industry is an oversimplistic reaction to how psychiatry, psychology,and our culture have transformed childhood into a diagnostic checklist. As mentioned in Ed's post, the litigation in Florida appears to be the recommendation by agencies receiving Medicaid funds to use these drugs in children with ADHD who also had tics. While none of the atypical antipsychotics, to my knowledge, are FDA approved for this condition, it is common knowledge among mental health professionals that the most effective treatment for tics are dopaminergic antagonists such as atypical antipsychotics. True, the recent National Institute of Health's CATIE study demonstrated that most of the atypicals were no better than the older ones. But that doesn't mean that the newer atypicals aren't effective or an appropriate treatment. Perhaps, our current social construction of adolescence is partly to blame for the boom in mental health diagnosis in our children.

Full post as published by Overlawyered on January 11, 2008 (boomark / email).