Friday, July 31, 2015
Are Too Many Seniors Taking Antidepressants?
Older Americans receive prescriptions for mental health medications at more than twice the rate that younger adults do, a new study finds.
The worry of previous decades—that America’s seniors weren’t receiving attention for mental health issues—may now need to shift, says Donovan Maust, the geriatric psychiatrist who led the analysis.
“We need to pay special attention to polypharmacy, or multiple drugs taken at once, when prescribing psychotropic drugs in this population, because so many older adults are already on multiple medications,” says Maust, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan....