Drops In SSRI prescription Rates May Coincide With Increases In Youth Suicides

Youth Suicides

A 2004 spike in suicide rates may have coincided with a drop in antidepressant prescriptions for youth, following warnings from U.S and European regulatory agencies that the medications might trigger suicidal thoughts.

NIMH grantees Robert Gibbons, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago and J. John Mann, M.D., Columbia University, and colleagues, make a case for a possible link between changes in prescription patterns, regulatory warnings and suicide rates in the September, 2007 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Concerned that decreased use of antidepressants could potentially have a negative public health impact, they predicted more increases in suicides if current trends continue. However, they based much of their analysis on data from the Netherlands, since U.S. suicide rates for 2005 won