To Medicate or Not To Medicate Your Child or Teenager |
Every day, many thousands of parents across the U.S. face the difficult question of whether to place their child or teenager on a psychotropic medication. Receiving a diagnosis of a mental disorder can be scary and confusing, for the youth as well as their parents/caretakers. What is ADHD? Depression? Anxiety? OCD? Bipolar? What are the available treatments? Do we have to use medications to treat the symptoms?
It seems that we are inundated every day with information about medications. Television airtime includes scores of ads about drugs, as do streaming services, social media platforms, and YouTube. It seems much of the U.S. is on medications.
Indeed, Americans take a lot of meds. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about a quarter of the U.S. population takes medications daily, and two-thirds used prescription medications at least at some point during the past year. In the older age group (age 65 and over), about 90% of Americans take medications. But rates are also high among kids and teens – about 20% use prescription medications. While this may be expected because kids commonly catch colds or other infections, medication use rates are also high for psychotropics. The CDC estimates that between 8 and 16% of kids/teens in the U.S. take a mental health medication.
By some accounts, kids in the US take psychotropic medications at about 5 times the rates commonly seen in other countries, like in Europe. Incessant exposure to medication ads likely contributes, since messages about how medications improve our lives influence decision-making for consumers as well as health care........