Depressed kids: 15,000 on meds
Number of teens and children on prescriptions nearly doubles in 10 years 7-year-old prescribed antidepressants
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The number of children and teenagers on Prozac-style antidepressants has soared 98 per cent in the past 10 years to a total of nearly 15,000 young people last year.
Ministry of Health figures released to the Herald under the Official Information Act showed 2163 children aged 13 or under collected a prescription of antidepressants known as Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) last year — an increase of 79.4 per cent since 2006.
The number of 14 to 18-year-olds who collected a prescription of SSRIs increased 101.9 per cent in the same timeframe to a total of 12,617 people last year.
Overall, 299,958 people were prescribed and collected the drugs last year — an increase of 64.9 per cent over the past 10 years.
Ministry of Health deputy director of mental health Dr Ian Soosay said about one in five people would experience depression by the age of 18 so there had been an increased effort to reduce its impact through diagnosis and treatment.
While population growth may have played a part, he believed the increase was more likely to be because more people were aware of Severe anxiety has been a daily struggle for about five years for one 7-year-old and his family.
The boy, who lives in a small town, has been diagnosed with anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder which is so severe he is unable to go to school.
His mother, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she had been told there was a 12-month wait for therapy so his paediatrician prescribed him antidepressants, but as far as she was concerned that was a last resort.
“Our problem with that as parents mental illness and were seeking help.
The use of the drugs had also risen because there were now fewer sideeffects associated with the medication and the drugs were less dangerous in overdose than older classes of antidepressants, Soosay said.
A Medsafe prescriber update from 2009 advised SSRI use among children and adolescents had consistently been associated with an increase in suicidal thoughts and that no antidepressant had ministerial consent for treating major depressive disorder in children and adolescents so consent was needed from the patient or parent.
Soosay confirmed there had been awareness of an increased risk of suicidal behaviour with young people on antidepressants but said clinical teams worked with patients and their families to make decisions We look forward to your feedback. is that he’s only 7 years old,” she said. “It’s really easy for him to get access to medication that they haven’t even actually researched for his age group but therapy is not accessible to him.
“As a parent, that makes me really angry. I would have thought therapy would have been given to us as a first option rather than medication.”
The family had decided to try micronutrient treatment, she said, before resorting to getting the antidepressant prescription filled. The treatment involves increasing the intake of specific vitamins and minerals the body sometimes fails to that balanced the benefits and risks of treatment.
A combination of antidepressants and psychological therapies was recommended, he said.
Auckland University Associate Professor of Psychiatry David Menkes said GPs were getting better at recognising and treating anxiety and depression so were prescribing the drugs more.
There was also the chance some people were prescribed the drugs unnecessarily after stressful events when often all they needed was social support or time out, he said.
Menkes said medication was not necessarily the best treatment for depression or anxiety.
Therapy or counselling were also effective and were more appropriate in some situations, but the high demand for those services meant they absorb. She said her son was an intelligent child but his anxiety meant he did not want to go to school and when he was there he refused to do any work.
He would often try to run away from school or lash out at anyone who tried to get him to do something, she said.
“The impact of it is really, really hard on the family. It pretty much becomes your whole life. The anxiety is really debilitating and for a child that young, they don’t have the cognitive ability to learn how to cope with it.” were not always readily available so drugs were sometimes prescribed instead.
“Antidepressants are not generally recommended for children and adolescents but they are nonetheless prescribed in some cases because they can be helpful, particularly alongside other treatments,” he said.
Mental Health Foundation chief executive Shaun Robinson agreed the increase might be due to more people seeking help, a tendency to prescribe drugs as a first line of treatment and because SSRIs were sometimes used to treat other problems such as chronic pain.
“We are . . . concerned that funding for mental health services hasn’t kept pace with demand, and some sources of free counselling have been discontinued in recent years.”
He said e-therapies such as SPARX had had some success helping young people recover from mild to moderate depression.
Youthline spokeswoman Briana Hill said more people were seeking help through the service each year and the number of calls where there was a serious threat to the health of the caller or others was increasing, which was in line with the increase in prescriptions for SSRIs.
Hill said about 12 per cent of the people Youthline spoke to cited mental health issues as the reason for their call.
The most common queries relating to antidepressant medication were around feeling the drugs were not working or whether there was a risk of becoming addicted, Hill said.