Bowen Chung, M.D.

Fellow in Child & Adolescent Depression

Project Details

PROJECT title

Factors associated with psychotropic medication prescription in children and adolescents with depression and co-morbid disorders

PROJECT SUMMARY

An area of research that I would like to focus on over the next two years would be to use an existing dataset, the Caring for California Initiative, to begin to do descriptive work examining the psychosocial, demographic, and system factors associated with antidepressant use in children.

Depression is the leading causes of disability worldwide and engenders a significant health and functional burden on individuals, families and communities. Approximately 20% of American youth experience a depressive episode by the age of 18 years.

Recently, the use of psychotropic medication usage has engendered much public controversy with the recent FDA blackbox warning issued around the association of increased suicidal ideation and the SSRI usage in teenagers. Articles in the scientific literature have documented the 2-3 fold increase in the use of psychotropic medication in children in the 1990’s.

The use of psychotropic medications has outpaced the scientific knowledge to support their safe and effective usage. Despite the high visibility of this topic, little information exists on national and statewide trends and patterns of psychotropic medication usage by children and adolescents.

This work will be done under the mentorship of Dr. Bonnie Zima using the Caring for California Initiative (CCI) database, an NIMH funded study examining the quality of care for children in publicly funded mental health clinics in California.

Read Researcher’s Biography