Foreword by Renée R. Jenkins

Summary

The twenty-first century is witness to a significant number of children and adolescents presenting to pediatricians and other primary care clinicians with a wide variety of mental health problems. The offices of clinicians can be overwhelmed with children and youth that present with symptoms or diagnoses of depression, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder, psychosis, substance abuse disorders, and others. A number of medications have been developed over the past half-century or more to help improve behavior in some of these conditions. However, a shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists in many parts of the world has left the pediatrician in the precarious position of monitoring their pediatric patients on various psychopharmacologic agents often without the help of these psychiatric consultants who are very busy themselves with new and complex patients.

Pediatric and Adolescent Psychopharmacology has been written to provide valuable information on these medications for pediatricians and other primary care clinicians. It is written as a guide book or “survivor's guide” for office practitioners to provide practical and very useful information on what psychopharmacologic agents are available for their pediatric patients. The authors succinctly discuss the pharmacology of these medications and include such critical information as pediatric dosages, side effects, drug interactions, which ones are FDA approved and what ages are covered by this approval, what tests must be monitored if a patient is taking them, and other data useful for such a primer of psychopharmacology.