Are Kids Given Antipsychotics Too Often?

Child's Death Reignites Debate Over How Aggressively Kids Should Be Treated With Psychiatric Drugs

(CBS)  Rebecca Riley's death shocked the Boston community. Did her parents deliberately give her overdoses of psychiatric drugs as prosecutors suggest? Or are her doctors to blame — as defense lawyers argue — for prescribing powerful medications when she was just 2 years old?

This case has reignited an emotional debate about mental illness in children. How young can children be diagnosed? And how aggressively should they be treated with anti-psychotic drugs?

“My worry is the same worry that any parents of kids like mine have — When is it too soon to medicate a child? Who knows?” says Susan Montanile.

Montanile struggled with that question when her son, Charlie, at the age of seven, was told he had bipolar disorder, a diagnosis that's increased 400 percent in children between 1990 and 2000.

What does it mean to be bipolar? Charlie explains it this way: “You get really mad easily. So let's just say I'm having a really fun time and someone makes a weird joke. Then I get really mad. So it's really hard to control.”

Charlie, now 13, takes three drugs twice a day — an antipsychotic, a mood stabilizer and another for anxiety. In six years, he's tried dozens of drugs.

“It's very hard for me, sometimes I even cry, it's so hard,” says Charlie.

Child psychiatrist Jess Shatkin of New York University’s Child Study Center says drugs should only be used cautiously and in addition to behavioral therapy.

“Most of these medications have not been well investigated in children and have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in children,” she says. “So by and large, there isn't a right age.”

Montanile’s concern now: that Rebecca Riley's tragic death will cause a backlash for parents like her.

“I just wish everybody would live with us for a week to know what we had to deal with before we made these decisions, which were tough decisions.”

And, Montanile says, those medications have given Charlie the chance to just be a kid.