Psychiatric drugs surge among kids
By Bruce Bower
During the early 1990s, the numbers of children and teenagers in the United States receiving prescriptions for psychiatric drugs rose markedly, a new study finds.
Julie M. Zito of the University of Maryland, Baltimore and her coworkers analyzed medical data on nearly 900,000 youngsters enrolled in Medicaid programs–in an unnamed mid-Atlantic or Midwestern state–or in a large health maintenance organization (HMO) in the Pacific Northwest. Psychiatric-drug use tripled at the HMO and in the Midwestern state, while it doubled in the mid-Atlantic state.