Psych meds in kids & teens are highly problematic. The hormonal fluctuations change the way that their bodies affect them, even from one day to the next, so finding a good fit? Is often -if not nearly always- an adventure in inpatient psychiatric care. In no small part as risk for suicide is astronomically high. In part, because children's brains react differently than adult brains, but also because their impulse control is generally far, far lower than an adults. So wherein an adult might go Yo! Doc! Get me the hell off the medication! teens have a habit of jumping, slicing their wrists, or simply walking out into traffic.
My son needed life saving medication for about a year and a half that had the pesky little side effect of giving him massive insomnia. 20-30 hours up before he could sleep. Since we were homeschooling? No biggie. A pain for both of us, for sure :wtf:, but it just required switching some lifestyle stuff around. During his various hospitalizations, they would sometimes admin a sedative so he could sleep... But it had to be strictly monitored (going on a sedative meant off the medically complex ward with hourly vitals, and into the PICU with constant monitoring). Both because kids just react weird to psych meds, and because of the risk of triggering suicidal impulse for the next 36-48 hours. At our hospital, the only 3 places kids are given sedatives or anti-anxiety meds are where they are under constant monitoring; surgical/postOp, psych, & the PICU. I got to know a lot of the psych parents really well, because the average stay for getting on bipolar meds was 90-180 days, and being a regional trauma center, our hospital got a whole helluva lot of bipolar kids who very desperately needed to be stabilized. ((Some of this is exp of dealing with my own kiddo, some being a hospital parent, and some from school.))
So that's the short term problem. The other big problem is that we really don't have great data -from a neurological perspective- on the long term effects of most psych meds on still developing brains. There are some meds which have been studied extensively in children, stimulants for ADHD primarily, but the vast majority of other psychiatric meds have such a strong tendency to cause very bad things in kids in the short term, that few have been studied longitudinally. So we simply don't know how they're going to affect neurological development.
About the only things I know of given to kids to help with sleep, that don't require an inpatient stay, are melatonin & antihistamines. But both can also trigger insomnia & rage. So it's a bit of a crap shoot, there.
ETA... Whoops! One other... which I kind of forgot about... Is pot. At our hospital it's primarily used for the cancer kids & appetite / pain control on top of, or when they're withdrawing them off fentanyl etc., and needed something to at least take the edge off while they kicked the narcotics enough to go back on the narcotics. It was something we were offered until they found out we were homeschooling (meaning we could adjust our schedule to fit his sleep schedule, and the if things got severe he wouldn't be missing school to come inpatient for a bit).
