The revised black box warning for antidepressants sets a public health experiment in motion.

Antidepressants and Suicide Risk: Considerations in Treating Patients with Major Depression

Hospital Physician May 2008 15 F or nearly 2 decades, there has been concern regarding the relationship between antidepressants and risk for suicide. This concern ultimately led the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to issue a public health advisory in 2004 warning of a possible increased risk of suicide in children and adolescents treated with certain antidepressant drugs.1 In October 2004...

Outside the Black Box: Re-assessing Pediatric Antidepressant Prescription.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this review is to assess whether evidence supports a favorable risk/benefit profile for pediatric antidepressant use and reconsideration of the black box. METHOD The review examines studies post-black box purporting to show declines in pediatric antidepressant use and rising youth suicide, summarizes evidence for efficacy and safety of pediatric antidepressants, and d...

A black-box warning for antidepressants in children?

Pediatric prescribing practices and the FDA Black-box warning on antidepressants.

BACKGROUND Since the FDA Black box warning in 2004, there has been a 58% drop in antidepressant use among children and adolescents with depression. Paralleling this decrease is an associated increase in completed suicides in youth. To date, no study has examined, on a clinician level, the changes in practice that have occurred subsequent to the FDA warning. OBJECTIVE To examine changes in ped...

Performance-Based Resource Allocation in Higher Education: A Black Box Containing the Paradox of Increasing Efficiency and Decreasing Productivity

To cope with escalating financial resource limitations from both expanding demands for higher education and experiencing a relatively reduction in public support, higher education units have profoundly adopted a performance-based resource allocation mechanism in recent years. Nevertheless, empirical evaluation findings show that the presumed improvement in performance has not been fulfilled. Us...