May 13, 2015 – SSRIs and Kids

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Anchor lead:  A leading class of antidepressants may be helpful for kids after all, Elizabeth Tracey reports

If you’re a kid with depression, chances are good no care provider wants to give you an SSRI, the most effective class of medications to treat depression, because of fears you might become briefly more likely to consider suicide. Based on this, the FDA issued a black box warning for these medicines in the young.  Now a discovery by Adam Kaplin, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues, may change that.

Kaplin: What we hope is that this will help destigmatize these medications because in the wake of the black box warning there has been a significant decrease in the prescription of these medicines and the suicide rates in kids have gone up. I think the take home message is we’ve found the mechanism that explains why these are not dangerous drugs, they’re just drugs that need to be titrated up or given an antidote to just that dangerous acute period when there can be an increased impulsivity.   :32

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.