Customer Reviews

Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychopharmacology Made Simple

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I've practiced adult psychiatry for several years but picked this up when I took a contract working with adolescents. It's a good refresher on starting doses and typical dose ranges for children. I don't look at it much anymore but for the first few weeks working with kids I used it a fair amount when trying to decide what doses to start with. I can imagine it would be a useful resource for primary care providers trying to treat children with mental illness.

This relatively short book is refreshing in its straightforward discussion of psychiatric medication for children and teens. The authors strongly urge psychotherapy for the majority of young people who experience emotional suffering. At the same time they describe state of the art drug treatments in a balanced fashion...both benefits and limitations. The book is filled with useful charts regarding medications (side effects, doses, etc.) and also important information on diagnosis. Also addressed are those important recent controversies about possible increases in suicidality in young people who are treated with antidepressants and rights of those seeking treatment with an emphasis on empowering consumers. It is a book both for professionals and parents.
This book is informative, written in plain English, realistic in its balanced apporoach and compassionate toward both patients and their parents struggling with their children's psychological pain.

As a parent of a child who suffers from depression, this book has been so helpful. It's about psychiatric meds but it also talks about the importance of psychotherapy, patient's rights, common worries (e.g. suicide), medication options and straightforward information about medication side effects. It is also short and to the point and written in plain English. My child matters to me and this book has been so helpful.

Preston, O'neal, and Talga have put together a pediatric psychopharmacology book that is concise and simple. It will provide the reader with an overview of psychotropic medications for children and adolescents. This book can also be handy for non-psychopharmacologists who work with this population, and could also make a resource for parents.
The book attempts to tackle various issues in psychopharmacology as well as psychiatric disorders in children and adolescent ranging from depression to bipolar disorder, and from psychotic disorders to ADHD, and Autism spectrum.
However, in their effort to make the book simple the authors produced a product that is choppy, incomplete, and filled with speculative, arbitrary and unsubstantiated statements.
Per example on page 27, paragraph 3, line 11, 12, the authors stated that "Additionally, the presence of psychotic symptoms should strongly increase one's index of suspicion that the patient has bipolar disorder." What is that mean? The authors failed to elaborate and to edify in this chapter and in the next one why is the existence of psychotic symptoms in a depressed patient is indicative of a bipolar disorder.

Also on Page 27, paragraph 2, the authors discussed the effectiveness of SSRIs for Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) as a PRN that can be taken for a short period of time without the side effects, but they failed to explain this mechanism. It is well publicized that therapeutic effects of these medicines take 3 to 4 weeks before they manifest. How can Prozac work its magic with PMDD after the first dose? No explanation was given.

Another example on Page 44, paragraph 3, line 1, 2, the authors stated: "First, it is generally accepted that bipolar disorder in juveniles is more severe that it is in adults." It is generally accepted by whom, and where is the evidence to corroborate this proclamation?
On page 74, line 10, paragraph 1, the authors also declared the following regarding stimulant medications for ADHD: "This suggest that appropriate pharmacological treatment may contribute to more-normal brain development, and in this respect medication treatments may be neuroprotective." Stimulants are neuroprotective? The authors forgot again to provide evidence to corroborate this statement. In addition, they neglected to address the latest studies that correlated lead exposure to ADHD, as well as the significant and positive association between phthalate exposure and this alleged disorder. The speculative examples will go on and on throughout this book.
I think the authors should've stayed away from the neurobiology of these alleged diseases as they did in the Depression chapter. By attempting to give their book a scientific look, they instead gave it a nebulous, subjective, confusing, and speculative look that undermined what they were conservatively trying to achieve. At the same time the book became a defensive dissertation on behalf of psychotropic medicine.
Subsequently, this book indirectly and cautiously advocates for the need of psychoactive medicines and defends the bad publicity that psychotropic drugs have supposedly received by the media. In addition, the authors often used terms like neurobiological and kindling as facts when referring to psychiatric disorders rather than unproven hypotheses (The kindling model is based on experiments in which epilepsy is induced in monkeys).
The information in this book is not groundbreaking but is similar to other books in the market or other information that is available on many websites. They used the controversial DSM-IV-TR as their guiding light, and they selectively laced their argument with certain studies that validate their views.
The authors are obviously addressing all of the psychiatric disorders as actual biological diseases that can be cured with a magic pill. Genetic determinism, chemical imbalance, kindled epilepsy, and psychopathic viruses are all part of a misdirected aim to view psychiatric syndromes as exclusively biological rather than having more intricate psychosocial origins.