The ethics of informed parental consent to psychiatric drugging of children.

That so many children are taking prescribed psychiatric drugs means that millions of parents have agreed to this recommendation for their children. Most pertinent to this fact is the question whether these parents have been given the opportunity to make their decisions in accordance with the legal standard of informed consent which requires a physician to disclose sufficient information for a patient to make an "informed" decision about a proposed treatment. At the least, such legitimate consent entails an opportunity to evaluate knowledgeably the options available and the risks attendant upon each, without coercion. This article examines the ethics of informed consent in psychiatry, and extant practices in the field, especially in regard to the psychiatric drugging of school age children in the United States. The authors argue that informed consent is systematically violated in this domain, and present a look at what authentic informed consent for parents to decide about psychiatric drugs for their children would entail.