In her article Davies reports that "In October 2003, the FDA issued a warning that children and teens that take antidepressant drugs to treat major depression may face a higher suicide risk. And in February 2004, an FDA advisory panel recommended stronger warnings about the risk of suicide in kids who take antidepressant drugs."
The FDA continued to monitor the situation as Gardiner Harris (September,2004) reported in The New York Times that when the Food and Drug Administration opened an advisory committee hearing the next day into the safety of antidepressants that "agency officials will also discuss the results of 22 clinical trials of antidepressants showing that teenagers and children given the pills were almost twice as likely to become suicidal as those given placebos. And few of the trials show that the drugs cured depression any better than placebos."
In the same article Harris also presents another side to the controversy when he cites two studies- one financed by the National Institute of Mental Health that found that Prozac was far more effective than talk therapy, or one-on-one counseling, in ameliorating the symptoms of depression in teenagers and children. And the other recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association which found that those taking antidepressants were most likely to become suicidal in the first nine days of treatment. After that, the risk of suicide, which is quite rare in any case, declines sharply.
The question 'are anti-depressant drugs harmful to our children?' remains unanswered to any degree that will satisfy all. There now seems to be two camps emerging (as with most controversial issues in any field of study )- those who agree that the drugs are harmful and that their use in children should be limited and those who are not convinced by the studies and maintain that depression in children should be treated with drugs.
