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More and More Toddlers Prescribed Antipsychotics

Do 18-month-olds need extreme psychiatric medicine?

By Kevin Spak, Newser Staff

Posted Sep 2, 2010 11:17 AM CDT

(Newser) – Kyle Warren was given his first dose of antipsychotic drugs to deal with his temper tantrums at 18 months. By age three, he’d been diagnosed with autism, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, insomnia, and oppositional defiant disorder, and was taking a fistful of psychiatric medicine each day. He was, his parents tell the New York Times, a drooling, sedated, overweight zombie. “You’d look into his eyes and you would just see blankness,” says his mother.

Warren is just one of many young children who, critics fear, are being prescribed serious psychiatric medicine far too early. More than half a million children and adolescents in America are on antipsychotics, and the rate at which the drugs have been prescribed to kids between the ages of two and five doubled from 2000 to 2007. Kyle, now 6, has since been weaned off all but one of his pills, with the help of a doctor who says there was no valid medical reason to give him the drugs in the first place. “It’s disturbing,” she says.

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We're giving a big dose of pills to very small people. (Shutterstock)

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I will never, ever let my children be put on these drugs again. I didn't realize what I was doing.
- Brandy Warren, Kyle's mother

It’s not easy to do this and prescribe this heavy medication. But when they come to me, I have no choice. I have to help this family, this mother. I have no choice. - Dr. Edgardo R. Concepcion, the child psychologist who first prescribed antipsychotics for Kyle Warren

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More and More Toddlers Prescribed Antipsychotics