When residents at the Kern Valley Nursing Home complained or annoyed nursing director Gwen Hughes, prosecutors say she chemically restrained them with powerful anti-psychotic drugs. Her methods were so severe, three residents died. A Food and Drug Administration official estimates that unnecessary anti-psychotics kill 15,000 nursing home patients each year.
“Our data should give some pause” to doctors and patients weighing antidepressants, Robert DeRubeis, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, said in a telephone interview. “They should give some consideration to other alternatives.” Exercise has been shown to be helpful to stem depression, as does psychotherapy, and even “self-treatment” with the aid of the plethora of self-help literature, he said.
About 60% of patients with psychiatrist office visits leading to a drug prescription received at least two medications in 2005-2006, according to government survey data. That was up from about 43% in 1996-1997. “These trends put patients at increased risk of drug-drug interactions with uncertain gains for quality of care and clinical outcomes,” the researchers stated.
“It is a worrisome trend, partly because very little is known about the short-term, let alone the long-term, safety of these drugs in this age group,” said study author Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City.
Drugmakers encouraged doctors to prescribe these drugs for children before the FDA sanctioned their use for youngsters. This was particularly troubling, given that the drugs can cause diabetes and weight gain, side effects that prompted thousands of lawsuits claiming that drugmakers tried to hide evidence of these problems.
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