How many kids take medications for mental health problems in the U.S. these days?

It’s a simple question, and one I’ve been getting asked a lot lately as I’ve been interviewed about my new book, Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up, about coming of age on psychiatric drugs.

And I’ve been embarrassed to hem and haw and not to have a single, easy answer.

Because here’s the thing: There are a lot of piecemeal stats from a lot of different sources, but they vary wildly, and there’s no single, unassailable source.

A new, important study published in the prestigious Archives of General Psychiatry found that antidepressants decrease the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior in adults and have no effect on the risk in children.

This is big news, since in 2004 the FDA slapped a black box warning on antidepressants, cautioning that they could cause suicidal tendencies in people under 18. In 2007, the agency extended that warning to young adults under age 25.

I’ve read the study and news accounts about it, including PsychCentral’s, but I’m still left with a lingering question. Perhaps some astute readers who know more about statistics than I can weigh in.

Based on the studies findings, can we conclude that there is really no association between antidepressant use and the risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in kids? Or did the kids who grew more suicidal while taking antidepressants and the kids who got less suicidal taking the medications just cancel each other out?

When the federal government released an important compendium of mental health data this week, the headlines proclaimed that 1 in 5 Americans over 18 had a diagnosable mental illness in the past year, and 1 in 20 had a “serious mental illness.”

But what does “serious mental illness” mean, anyway, and what are its connotations and implications when it comes to treatment? It’s a question worth asking, because it’s used differently in different contexts.

Once you start following the debate about young people and psychotropic drugs, you see the word “overmedicated” bandied around a lot.

I’ve argued before that deeming kids overmedicated without saying what constitutes properly medicated doesn’t make a lot of sense. Still, at least we have some idea of approximately what percentage of kids in the United States – and, to a lesser extent, in other countries – take various kinds of psychiatric meds. What we don’t know is how long the kids continue to take these medications.

This is a frustrating knowledge gap if, like me, you’re interested in the long-term “psychosocial” effects of taking meds – that is, how the experience shapes kids’ outlooks and identities.