Why the Kids Are Not All Right

Many doctors continue to use our adolescents as guinea pigs when it comes to the prescribing of anti-depressant medication.

As far back as 2004, the Food and Drug Administration issued a “black box warning” — the most serious type of warning in prescription drug labeling. It cautioned the public about selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant use among children and adolescents. The medication, in some cases, led to reactions that included potentially suicidal thoughts.

Yet many doctors continue to prescribe or overprescribe these drugs.

Related: No Easy Answers for Depression

Approximately five percent of 12- to 19-year-olds take SSRIs right now, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. And this is chronic use. Sixty-two percent of these adolescents have been using antidepressants for two years or longer, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

Unfortunately, the majority of these young people are not properly supervised when it comes to mental health evaluations. Less than a third have met with a professional in the field within the past year.

Many doctors believe it’s inappropriate for depressed children to be treated with medicine alone.

“My personal approach has typically been CBT [cognitive behavioral therapy] and interpersonal therapy as the first line of defense,” said Dr. Priya Sodhi, a psychologist based in Scarsdale, New York.

If psychotherapy is ineffective, doctors then frequently supplement that therapy with medication.

Millions of young people lack the conception “of what it is to feel like themselves,” as SSRIs numb their systems.

Still, the majority of SSRIs prescribed to adolescents are ineffective and potentially even dangerous to them, a recent study in The Lancet found. Of 14 commonly prescribed drugs, only one — Prozac — has proved effective enough “to justify giving to children and teens.”

The aggressive push of SSRIs is a result of the perfect storm: The multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry has made grandiose claims about their effectiveness, while doctors and parents have wanted to believe there’s a simple solution for adolescent depression. However, most SSRI claims aren’t true.

Dr. Don Raden, a child psychiatrist at the Chicago Integrative Center for Psychiatry, told LifeZette, “SSRIs have had minimal benefit to my patient population.” He added, “The ultimate goal of psychiatric care is to determine the [cause] of the condition rather than mask the symptoms with pharmaceutical agents.”

Many doctors are prescribing SSRIs to treat maladies in kids for which the medication was not intended. Up to 60 percent of prescribed SSRIs are used to treat other conditions, including binge eating disorder and ADHD, which were not FDA-approved. Scientific American covered this topic in a recent piece.

This super saturation of SSRIs in our population can have tragic consequences. Eric Harris was taking an SSRI when he and his classmate killed 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, in 1999. Cho Seung-Hui was on SSRIs when he killed 32 students and faculty members at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, in 2007.

“There’s a strong link between kids taking SSRIs and violent thoughts and suicidal tendencies,” said Dr. Sodhi, the New York psychologist. Some 90 percent of school shooters over the past two decades have been connected in some way to SSRIs, according to WorldNetDaily.

Related: Suicide Attempt is Foiled by Prayer

Even under professional care, weening young people off SSRIs is difficult. Many adolescents suffer from withdrawal symptoms: nausea, headaches, dizziness. As a result, more students than ever are arriving at college on antidepressants.

The effect of SSRIs can transcend the individual. Researchers have documented a correlation between SSRIs and the exponential rise in autism. Professor Anick Bérard of the University of Montreal published a study in JAMA Pediatrics showing that expectant mothers who took antidepressants were 87 percent more likely to have a baby born with autism.

What some professionals remind us of is this: Instead of going with a quick but potentially dangerous SSRI fix, adolescence is “the age of instability.”

Said Dr. David Ramirez, head of counseling and psychological services at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, “There’s been a kind of pathologization of life itself … Life is full of stress, and anxiety, and sadness — those are just baseline phenomena that have come to be considered illnesses that need to be treated.”

Instead of allowing young people to build up their resilience, doctors and parents are allowing adolescents to numb themselves. Millions of young people lack the conception “of what it is to feel like themselves.”

To Dr. Raden, doctors are being myopic by overprescribing SSRIs. The majority of a person’s serotonin is not in the brain but in the gut: “The Mayo Clinic recently published a study showing that 80 percent of serotonin is produced by the microbiome of the gut,” he said. “As a result, optimization of the gut flora is necessary to effectively treat depression.”

Nutrition may be one key to stopping the SSRI epidemic. Research has shown that a high carbohydrate diet promotes the inflammation of cells, and this inflammation can lower serotonin levels, “which is the cause of depression,” according to Dr. Raden. Young people need to reduce their sugar and carbohydrate intake and transition to a higher protein diet with omega-3 fatty acids, vegetables, and fruits.

Related: Scary Lack of Empathy in Young People

Rather than aggressively medicate young people, we need to turn to more traditional methods such as psychotherapy. SSRIs can obscure an adolescent’s true self — while turning to psychotherapy can allow a young person to learn how to manage himself.

Additionally, researchers need to do more longitudinal studies that will allow the public to understand the long-term effects of SSRIs. Rather than continue to risk the long-term health of our children, it is imperative we protect our kids from harm.

Daniel Riseman, founder of Riseman Educational Consulting in Irvington, New York, has been counseling students and working with families for 16 years.