After the FDA issued warnings about antidepressants, youth suicides rose and mental health care dropped

February 15, 2022 8.22am EST

Authors
Stephen Soumerai
Professor of Population Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University

Ross Koppel
Professor of Medical Informatics and Adjunct Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania; Professor of Biomedical Informatics, University at Buffalo

Disclosure statement

Stephen Soumerai receives funding from the NIH..

Ross Koppel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Depression in young people is vastly undertreated. About two-thirds of depressed youth don’t receive any mental health care at all. Of those who do, a significant proportion rely on antidepressant medications.

Since 2003, however, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned that young people might experience suicidal thinking and behavior during the first months of treatment with antidepressants.

The FDA issued this warning to urge clinicians to monitor suicidal thoughts at the start of treatment. These warnings appear everywhere: on TV and the internet, in print ads and news stories. The most strongly worded warnings appear in black boxes on medication containers themselves.

We are professors and researchers at Harvard Medical School, the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and University at Buffalo. For over 30 years, we have been studying the intended and unintended effects of health policies on patient safety.

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