Some medications aren't overprescribed

Interesting news from an article in the Washington Post:

Warnings from federal regulators four years ago that antidepressants were increasing the risk of suicidal behavior among young people led to a precipitous drop in the use of the drugs. Now a new study has found that the drop coincides with an unprecedented increase in the number of suicides among children...

The trend lines do not prove that suicides rose because of the drop in prescriptions, but Gibbons, Insel and other experts said the international evidence leaves few other plausible explanations. Previous studies have shown that U.S. suicide rates are lower in counties where antidepressant use is higher, and a recent study of 200,000 depressed veterans found that those taking an antidepressant had one-third the risk of suicide of those who were not.

There's some ghoulish calculus here, but all-in-all it seems to say that young people probably have less anti-depressants than they could really use.  I think the conventional wisdom is that we're over-prescribing our kids.  That may be true for some medications, but this is a rather important exception.