Prescribed Psychotropic  Medication Use in Patients Receiving Residential Addiction Treatment

Extract

A high level of prescribed antidepressant use has been reported in patients receiving specialized addiction treatment (Knudsen et al., 2007) despite uncertainty about which, if any, of these patients will benefit from this medication.

We aimed to investigate patterns of antidepressant and other prescribed psychotropic medication use among patients attending short-term residential addiction treatment.

Data were obtained retrospectively from clinical files for all patients admitted over a 12-month period. For patients with two or more admissions, only the first admission was considered. Patients predominantly had a severe alcohol or other substance use disorder, were psychiatrically stable and had either completed medical detoxification or did not require it. Diagnoses were made at admission according to DSM-5 criteria using a non-structured clinical interview conducted by a single experienced addiction clinician. Diagnoses were informed by existing information from medical and psychiatric records.

Patients’ current prescribed medications were recorded at admission. In analyses presented here, medications prescribed short term for seizure prophylaxis or management of withdrawal symptoms were excluded.