Treatment Of U.S. Children With Antidepressants Becoming More Common

The recent tragedy in Littleton, Colorado, by two teenagers should draw attention to the possible disastrous side effects of anti-depressants. One of the teenage gunmen, Eric Harris, who went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School was one of the nearly 800,000 children who are on anti-depressants nationwide.  In 1998 Kip Kinkel, a youth in Oregon who killed his parents and two school mates had been treated with Prozac, one of the most common anti-depressants given to children under eighteen years of age.

According to a report in the Washington Times, Dr. David G. Fassler, a child and adolescent psychiatrist who is chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Children, Adolescents and Families, admitted that more children are being treated with anti-depression medicines than ever before.

Children on Anti-Depressants

Number of children 17 years and

Younger using one of three

Commonly prescribed anti-depressants;

Prozac, Zoloft or Paxil in 1996 and 1997

Source: IMS Health pharmaceutical research

Firm/Washington Times, April 30, 1999

What should be of great concern is that not a single anti-depressant has been extensively studied in juveniles. Luxor, which is the mind-altering drug that Harris was taking, is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder, not depression in minors, even though it is commonly prescribed as a depression therapy in this age group.

Though doctors deny that drugs trigger the kind of violence as exhibited by Harris and Kinkel, they admit, “anti-depressants can unmask an underlying manic depression in patients predisposed to that type of mental disorder.”

According to IMS Health, an independent pharmaceutical research firm in Pennsylvania, in 1997, 792,000 children in the U.S. between the ages of 6 to 18 were taking one of three anti-depressants; Prozac, Paxil or Zoloft. That was an increase of more than 90,000 children over the previous year. These figures do not include children on the drug, Luvox.

From a survey of office-based physicians, IMS Health also found that in 1998, doctors issued a total of 1,664,000 prescriptions for Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and Luvox for patients 18 and younger. What is disturbing is that these hundreds of thousands of children on anti-depressants are in addition to the nearly million children who are on Ritalin, a drug which physicians themselves believe is one of the most over-prescribed drugs for children in this country.

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