After reading these articles, you should be able to…

Nearly one in three foster children have significant psychiatric problems during their time in foster care—especially those related to trauma and neglect that brought them into the system. This article is a brief primer on how foster care works, and how psychiatrists get involved.

In response to the rising use of psychotropic medications in Medicaid and foster care populations, some states, including California, have implemented specific guidelines. This article covers those guidelines with case examples.

Foster children tend to be over-medicated. Surveys show that foster youth receive 5 times the number of psychotropic medications, frequently three or four simultaneously, as privately insured children. What else, beside medications, can we offer foster children who are often struggling with psychiatric issues and difficult and unfamiliar family environments?

We're happy to welcome Glen Elliott, MD, PhD, as the new Editor-in-Chief of the Carlat Child Psychiatry Report. Dr. Elliott is a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist with a distinguished and varied career.

Investigative journalist Karen de Sá wrote a series for the San Jose Mercury News called “Drugging Our Kids” about medication treatment of foster children. She found that almost one in four foster children between 12 and 17 were receiving a psychotropic of some kind, and 62% were receiving an antipsychotic. Her reporting spurred the California legislature to pass several laws designed to discourage the excessive use of psychotropics in foster children.

After reading these articles, you should be able to…

Getting meds just right is challenging in autism. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes it doesn't work out so well. No two people with Autism Spectrum Disorder are alike, meaning that our medication choices have to be individualized even more so than in most other psychiatric syndromes.

Let’s look at the three most important benchmarks in autism diagnosis history.

Dr. Kolevzon shares his clinical strategies for treating autism spectrum disorder in child patients, including diagnostic behaviors and communicating with parents.