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Potent antipsychotics given to children as young as two can lead to significant weight gain, according to new Canadian research into a class of drugs that one prominent American psychiatrist says are being used as tools of “social control.”

The number of children being started on second-generation antipsychotics, or SGAs, has grown exponentially, with prescriptions increasing 18-fold in B.C. alone between 1996 and 2011. Across Canada, between 2005 and 2009, antipsychotic drug recommendations for children and youth increased 114 per cent.

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The new study was based on 147 children aged 10 to 16 treated at Hôtel-Dieu de Lévis hospital in Quebec between 2005 and 2013. The youth were part of a program created to track the metabolic effects of SGAs on children being treated with the mood-altering drugs for the first time.

Once reserved for schizophrenia in adults, the drugs are being prescribed “off-label” — used in an unapproved way or for an unapproved age range or dosage — to adolescent boys, as well as girls and younger children, for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), aggression and behaviour problems.