Pharmacotherapy

Description of the Strategy

Pharmacotherapy as a treatment modality for children and adolescents is a relatively young discipline that is based more on the collective experiences of clinicians than on empirical verification of the effects of various classes of psychoactive medications on children's psychiatric disorders. Because of the paucity of empirical data, pharmacotherapy was regarded as the treatment of last resort in this population until the mid-1990s. Indeed, clinicians did not consider it during initial treatment formulation until all other treatment modalities had been tried.

The situation today, however, is somewhat different. Although there are still few empirically based studies on the use of psychotropic drugs in the treatment of childhood disorders, pharmacotherapy is considered, along with other treatment modalities, an integral part ...