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“It doesn’t tell us how many tablets were dispensed at each time, how long the prescription was for or if each went to a different child,” said co-author Dr. Corine Carlisle, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

“It could be that people are being very cautious in giving only one week’s worth of medicine at a time, so, for a month of treatment there could be four prescriptions instead of one,” she said.

However, Tadrous said a prescription count is often a “reasonable indicator of increased use.”

The numbers also weren’t broken down by age. “A four-year-old with anxiety, we’re not going to go first to an SRRI, we’re going to be working with the parent to address the anxiety issue that child is having,” Carlisle said.

However, other studies have found antidepressants and antipsychotics are being prescribed to children as young as six.

Dr. Allen Frances says the major driving force behind the increased prescribing of psychotropic drugs to children is “pill pushing” by drug companies.

“Having saturated the adult market, Pharma has turned its attention to aggressively marketing pills for children who are, in some ways, their perfect customers — because once pills solutions become the norm, the kid may become a customer for life,” said Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke University who chaired the task force that produced the fourth edition of psychiatry’s official manual of mental disorders.