Foster youth and psychotropic treatment: Where next?

Jeffrey Longhofer, Jerry Floersch and Nate Okpych

Children and Youth Services Review, 2011, vol. 33, issue 2, 395-404

Abstract: Foster care children are prescribed psychotropic medications at rates significantly higher than same-aged peers. Concerns about the safety of psychoactive chemicals on developing bodies and potential misuses with foster care populations have led to varied and complex responses by the media, lawmakers, and researchers. First, we look at how foster youth are prescribed psychoactive substances, including polypharmacy (sometimes called concomitant prescription), and at the mounting and major responses by federal and state governments. Second, we consider a recent parameter published by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Third, we consider how foster care settings, what we call open systems, complicate parameter implementation, creating potential gaps among researcher, prescriber, foster caregivers, and youth medication explanatory models of treatment experience. And finally, to address gaps among researcher, prescriber, and patient explanatory models, we propose the use of arbitrage, a conceptual framework and process for the integration of competing and sometimes incommensurable explanatory models, knowledge and practice claims.

Keywords: Foster; care; Psychotropic; medication; Treatment; parameter; illness; behavior; Explanatory; models; Practice; arbitrage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190-7409(10)00340-3
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:33:y:2011:i:2:p:395-404

Access Statistics for this article

Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey

More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().