An abstract of “National Trends in the Outpatient Treatment of Children and Adolescents with Antipsychotic Drugs” is available from the Archives of General Psychiatry.
The use of antipsychotic drugs to treat children and adolescents increased by more than five times from 1993 to 2002, a study found.
The study, published in the June 2006 issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, estimates that the number of youths in the United States under age 20 who were treated with antipsychotic drugs for problems such as aggression and mood swings jumped from about 201,000 in 1993 to 1,224,000 in 2002.