Knowledge, expectations, and attitudes of hospitalized children and adolescents in psychopharmacological treatment.

ABSTRACT Child and adolescent psychiatric inpatients (ages 6-16 years) receiving psychopharmacological treatment were compared with unmedicated inpatients regarding their knowledge about medication treatment, expectations of help from these treatments, and attitudes regarding their own use of medication. Most children and adolescents in this sample correctly knew the name of their medication, their current dosage, the general purpose of the medication treatment, and at least two side effects that could be induced by their medication. A drug-treated child's knowledge about pharmacotherapy correlated positively with mental age rather than chronological age, but their prescribing psychiatrists appeared to be highly influenced by chronological age in estimating a child's knowledge about medication treatment. Clinicians may be generally misjudging their patients' knowledge of pharmacotherapy by relying on the child's looks rather than the child's smarts. Neither children's knowledge nor expectations of pharmacotherapy appear to be strong determinants of their attitudes about taking medications on an inpatient unit. It may be speculated that other factors are relevant to predicting attitudes related to compliance with psychopharmacotherapy during hospitalization.