New Innovations Needed to Address Psychotropic Medication Use in Foster Care

Abstract

The number of children in foster care has grown by 10.6 percent in the last five years to nearly 443,000 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2019). Research has shown that foster youths (FY) have short- and long-term adverse health effects (Nguyen, 2014) including a range of mental health issues (Raghavan, Inoue, Ettner, Hamilton, & Landsverk, 2010). Up to 67 percent of FY had some type of mental health disorder, including 23 percent with major depression, 28 percent with conduct disorder, and 8 percent with posttraumatic stress disorder (Bronsard et al., 2016). Unfortunately, only about half of these FY receive care and services meeting any type of national standard (Raghavan et al., 2010). One particular area of concern is the use of psychotropic medications (PMs) to address mental health issues among FY (Government Accountability Office [GAO], 2017)....