In last week’s Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health reported that twice the percentage of people aged 80 to 84 are being prescribed antipsychotic drugs, when compared to the 65 to 69 year-old age group. While it does seem at least remotely possible that a lot of seniors have gone clinically insane, it turns out that’s not actually true. Seventy-five percent of seniors given such a prescription actually had no documented mental disorder that year.
