Can children be addicted to psychiatric drugs?
One important source of addiction is people’s emotional problems and bad feelings about themselves, including anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. Children and adolescents are more likely than ever before to be diagnosed with psychiatric problems such as depression, bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder, and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). If your children have serious emotional problems, you need to address them. Contemporary psychiatric treatment for young people typically involves giving them drugs. There has been considerable debate about the use of psychiatric medications for childhood emotional problems. Although this book is not a general mental health manual, the potential addictive impact of the drug therapies increasingly administered to children and adolescents is a serious consideration, as we discuss in Chapter 8. How can drugs prescribed to help children be harmful addictions? Neither I nor the American Psychiatric Association recognizes positive vari
