Healthy Skepticism Library item: 304

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Guart A.
New York University Now A 'Meds' School: Doling out antidepressants
The New York Post 2004 Apr 18

Full text:

A growing number of students at the troubled New York University – where four students have plunged to their deaths in recent months – are getting antidepressant drugs from school psychiatrists, an alarming internal report reveals.

Prescriptions written by the school’s mental-health unit for anti-anxiety drugs – such as Xanax and BuSpar – tripled over the past five years, the 116-page report stated.

“Medication therapy, once a peripheral aspect of college mental health, has moved front and center,” a December 2003 report by NYU on undergraduate programs stated.

At the same time, prescriptions at NYU for anti-psychotic drugs such as Clozapine jumped 173 percent, the study showed. During the 2002-2003 academic year, the school doled out meds to 750 students – or one in five who used NYU’s University Counseling Service.

University spokesman John Beckman said the jump in medicated students was a reflection of a nationwide problem, as more than half of those who got prescriptions were already on the medications when they arrived from high school.

“We’re seeing more students who might not have graduated high school without the medication.”

In the wake of the report, the university has turned for help from the citywide, 24-hour crisis hot line, LifeNet. Under a new partnership with the university, LifeNet hired a full-time counselor to handle calls from troubled NYU students last month and has developed a formal protocol for handling them. NYU students who call LifeNet will be referred to the counselor, who will work closely with the university’s mental health, alcohol and substance-abuse programs.

The internal report, completed last December, comes as the prestigious school struggles to lift student morale in the wake of the four deaths between September and March.

The report also found that NYU freshmen appear to be more depressed than students at other universities. At NYU, 16 percent of its freshmen “seriously considered suicide” at least once last year – three percentage points higher than the national average.