Contact your doctor immediately if you experience serious side effects.” This disclaimer should be a red flag that antidepressants can be as harmful as helpful to adults and especially in children, older adults and pregnant women. Many adults using this medication do not have serious side effects but there are not enough studies on children and adolescents to know exactly how they will be affected. Antidepressants (ADs) are commonly prescribed to children and adolescents for depression, anxiety, and a variety of other disorder. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), first introduced in the late 1980s, were prescribed to children for depression on the basis of effectiveness data from trials on adult psychiatric disorders coupled with other trial data demonstrating the ineffectiveness of tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) [2–5]. In the early 2000s, SSRIs became the preferred treatment for depression in children rather than tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) (Wiljaars, …show more content…
Being diagnosed with a mental illness brings with it many complications and future issues that may never go away. Once someone is diagnosed with such an illness it will always remain in their medical file and follow them wherever they go but the dangers associated with antidepressants can make the situation even worse. Antidepressants can cause some people, especially children and adolescents, to commit suicide and actually get worse than they were before they started taking the medication and what’s bad is there is no way of knowing how it will affect someone until they actually start taking it. Since there are other options to try first, all these other options should be thoroughly examined and eliminated before trying antidepressants in children and adolescents. The risks associated with antidepressants really are not worth the benefits when it comes to treating children and adolescents with