DQ Treating Pediatric Patients With Mood Disorders
Assignment: Assessing and Treating Pediatric Patients With Mood Disorders When pediatric patients present with mood disorders, the process of assessing, diagnosing, and treating them can be quite complex. Children not only present with different signs and symptoms than adult patients with the same disorders, they also metabolize medications much differently. Yet, there may be times when the same psychopharmacologic treatments may be used in both pediatric and adult cases with major depressive disorders. As a result, psychiatric nurse practitioners must exercise caution when prescribing psychotropic medications to these patients. For this Assignment, as you examine the patient case study in this week’s Learning Resources, consider how you might assess and treat pediatric patients presenting with mood disorders. But there may be times when both children and adults with major depressive disorders can use the same psychopharmacological treatments. Because of this, psychiatric nurse practitioners must be careful when giving these patients psychotropic drugs. As you look at the patient case study in this week’s Learning Resources for this assignment, think about how you might evaluate and treat a child with a mood disorder.
To prepare for this Assignment:Review this week’s Learning Resources, including the Medication Resources indicated for this week.Reflect on the psychopharmacologic treatments you might recommend for the assessment and treatment of pediatric patients requiring antidepressant therapy.
The Assignment: 5 pages
Examine Case Study: An African American Child Suffering From Depression. You will be asked to make three decisions concerning the medication to prescribe to this patient. Be sure to consider factors that might impact the patient’s pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic processes. At each decision point, you should evaluate all options before selecting your decision and moving throughout the exercise. Before you make your decision, make sure that you have researched each option and that you evaluate the decision that you will select. Be sure to research each option using the primary literature.
