Infants on Prozac? Check These Shocking Stats

Doctors prescribed sedatives and powerful, mood-altering medications for nearly 700 Ohio babies and toddlers on Medi-caid last summer, according to a Dispatch review of records.
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''It's shocking,'' said Dr. Ellen Bassuk, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. ''Who's really being helped by these children being drugged? The babies? Or their caregivers?
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Federal officials have long required that drugs be screened for safety in adults. But less than one-fourth have been tested on children.
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Psychiatric medications are big business.

In 2002, drug companies made $12 billion in profits from antidepressants alone. Those numbers continue to grow, largely because of increasing use on children.

Nationwide, the number of children using psychiatric medications tripled between 1987 and '99.
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Even infants put on pills

Advocates are equally distressed by the high numbers of drugged-up infants. In 1994, 3,000 prescriptions for Prozac were written nationwide for children younger than 1 year old, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Almost all psychiatric prescriptions for toddlers and preschool children are ''off label'' — without dosage recommendations and for conditions other than those for which the drugs were created.

—by Encarnacion Pyle, “Even Babies Getting Treated as Mentally Ill,” April 25, 2005, from the series, “Drugged Into Submission,” The Columbus Dispatch