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Initiative targets psychotropic drugs for preschoolers
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3-27-2000 Washington. The Clinton administration announced March 20 a major initiative to reverse a sharp increase in the number of preschool children taking powerful psychiatric drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac. At a White House press conference, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton said large numbers of preschoolers are getting the drugs without being properly evaluated by physicians. "Some of these young people have problems that are symptoms of nothing more than childhood or adolescence," Clinton said. The administration’s plan includes a campaign to inform parents and teachers about the risks of such drugs, new drug labels to be developed by the Food and Drug Administration, a $6 million nationwide study of Ritalin use in children under 6, and a White House conference this fall on the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in very young children. Ritalin is used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, which the National Institute of Mental Health calls the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder in children. The initiative is a response to a study published in February in the Journal of the American Medical Association that revealed sharp increases in the number of preschoolers taking psychotropic drugs. The JAMA study examined the Medicaid and HMO records of more than 200,000 children ages 2 to 4 who were prescribed a variety of psychotherapeutic drugs between 1991 and 1995. During that time, the researchers said, the likelihood of children being prescribed the drugs rose between 300 percent and 1,000 percent. In an editorial in JAMA last month, Joseph Coyle, MD, chairman of the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, said one reason for the rise in prescriptions might be that many state Medicaid programs do not pay for a thorough evaluation of behavioral disorders in children. Calling this a "growing crisis in mental health services to children," Coyle said, "it appears that behaviorally disturbed children are now increasingly subjected to quick and inexpensive pharmacological fixes as opposed to informed, multimodal therapy."
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