The number jumped out at me as I was reading a newly published study on mental health treatment in nursing homes: 71 percent.
Within three months of admission, a team of University of South Florida researchers determined, 71 percent of Medicaid residents in Florida nursing homes were receiving a psychoactive medication — an antidepressant or anti-psychotic, say, or dementia drugs — even though most were not taking such drugs in the months before they moved in and didn’t have psychiatric diagnoses. Fifteen percent of residents were taking four or more such medications. But only 12 percent were getting nondrug treatments like behavioral therapy.
Unlike me, Victor Molinari, a professor of aging at the University of South Florida and lead author of the study, wasn’t startled by those statistics. “They confirmed what I suspected,” he told me in an interview. “And people who work in nursing homes wouldn’t be surprised.”
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