Antipsychotics in Children and Adolescents at Clinical High Risk for Psychosis

Abstract

The prescription of antipsychotics in young children and adolescents is a delicate, complex, and often divisive issue, where official guidelines and real-world prescriptive habits seldom correspond.¹ Such discrepancy is even more radical and excruciating in those conditions with an established higher risk of imminent development of an overt psychotic state (ie, Clinical High Risk for Psychosis [CHR-P] and the related diagnostic construct of DSM-5 Attenuated Psychosis Syndrome [APS]) that fall below the severity threshold for a DSM-5 diagnosis of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.